Clearing contamination in large networks

Michael Simpson, Srinivasan Venkatesh, Alex Thomo

Abstract: In this work, we study the problem of clearing contamination spreading through a large network where we model the problem as a graph searching game. The problem can be summarized as constructing a search strategy that will leave the graph clear of any contamination at the end of the searching process in as few steps as possible. We introduce an efficient algorithm and experimentally observe its performance on several large online networks including Slashdot, Epinions and Twitter.