But if one of those villagers travels to the big city, adding one distant link to all the close links at home, the village is connected to the wider world. The results were astonishing, Watts said. The properties of the lattice change dramatically. It still forms clusters, but the pathways between clusters are much shorter. Immediate neighborhoods and more distant neighborhoods are suddenly closer together.
Information spreads more quickly.
Each node has access to more information and can do more things. In being connected to more neighbors, nodes begin to cooperate and synchronize. The huge surprise is that it takes very few short cuts between nodes and clusters to turn a big world into a small world, Watts said. After a point, adding more short cuts does not improve network efficiency. Such worlds could be random but they are not.