A world filled with jurisdictions

Anyone who wants to create a toy world that can be used to simulate how regulations work and are developed internationally needs at least a sort of sandbox in which geo-political structures can be sketched, and with that the infrastructure channels that can be used in cross-border trade. So areas have to be demarcated, boundaries set and infrastructures built.

Our world is like a quilt. Patchwork, where each patch represents a jurisdiction. Jurisdictions have numerous parts and characteristics that play roles in the realization of internationally coordinated regulation. The designer must make choices and limit himself. For the time being, he gives each jurisdiction a variable for a representative (president), a culture (an ordered set of groups with their own moralities), a government (legislators and enforcers), an economy (a set of markets) and an infrastructure ( with physical and intellectual networks). Those variables take the form of lists so that they can be left empty and their contents be adjusted on the go. Jurisdictions are assigned a patch to regulate (initially at random).

How do we make infrastructures look in that world? Like networks based on a limited number of connections per jurisdiction? I show six examples, aiming for an average of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 connections per jurisdiction, respectively.

We use the following method. First we create a world, without distinguishing patches. There are coordinates. We choose the number of jurisdictions and give them a (provisional) place using random coordinates.

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The six graphs show what infrastructures will initially look like when we assume a world in which any jurisdiction searches for any partner, provided the average number of links remains around the specified R0 number. (That number comes from the epidemiologist world and refers to the number of infections spread by a single person.) We show the resulting networks in a visually optimized form.

When we try to get an impression of which representation might be most useful for the initial state of the toy world, it is clear that the R0 number matters for the structure of the network. What is preferred when is still to be discussed. This also applies to alternative construction methods (as with preferential attachment).