Think of cities and roads. A group of cities forms a clique only if there's a road directly between every pair of cities in the group. In other words, every member of a clique is fully connected to every other member of the clique, meaning there is no possible way for there to be more connections to be made.
For LJ, substitute "friend of", and for the road to be two-way, they must be friend each other. Two people who friend each other are a clique of 2. Finding the largest group of people that form a clique is a difficult computational problem, actually.
Or, more simply, a clique is a group of LJ "friends" in which each person is a "friend" of every other person in the group. So the clique meme is that the program looks at your friends list, and your friends' friends lists, and so forth, to find the largest set of people in which everyone is everyone else's friend.
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Date: 2004-07-01 04:46 pm (UTC)For LJ, substitute "friend of", and for the road to be two-way, they must be friend each other. Two people who friend each other are a clique of 2. Finding the largest group of people that form a clique is a difficult computational problem, actually.
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Date: 2004-07-01 05:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-07-01 05:10 pm (UTC)