01
Trade
Bilateral goods trade, from the network the engine runs on. The densest layer and the only one that is also a model input.
Reference
A graph that conducts
Six hundred and fourteen entities across sixteen kinds, joined by two thousand seven hundred and sixty one ties across ten. Put a shock into any one of them and watch where it actually goes.
The network view
The geography taken away
Six hundred entities and nearly three thousand ties, drawn as what they are: who is bound to whom, by trade, alliance, cable, pipeline and ownership. A shock put into any node runs along the ties it actually has, and the view shows it going.
Why it is not two billion nodes
Because two billion nodes is not a graph anybody can look at, it is a number, and a browser that tried to lay one out would stop being a browser. What a person can read, and what a machine can relax into a legible layout inside a second, is a few hundred to a couple of thousand. So this carries the entities that carry consequence, at the coarsest level where each one still behaves differently from its neighbours. A cable is one node rather than its eleven landing stations, because a cable fails as a cable. A country is one node rather than its forty million people, because a tariff is set by a country. That is the level at which an edge means something, and an edge that means nothing is worse than an edge that is missing.
Three scales, each inside the next
Countries
Two hundred and thirty eight economies, the five alignments they are counted on and the sixteen treaty organisations they belong to. This is the trade network the engine actually runs on, which means the ties are the same ones the simulation uses rather than a drawing of them.
Physical
Adds the hardware trade moves through: thirteen maritime chokepoints, thirty eight subsea cables, twenty three pipelines, thirty four LNG terminals and the thirty largest container ports. At this scale a country is joined to the strait its trade has to cross and to every cable that comes ashore in it.
Everything
Adds fifty three datacenters, twenty five exchanges, thirty airports, twenty five refineries, twenty four critical mineral operations, thirty power stations, twenty five research clusters, and the five goods the model clears. This is the scale at which a shock can be followed from a mine to a datacenter.
Ten kinds of tie, and what each one means
02
Transits
A chokepoint and a country whose trade has to pass through it. The strongest tie after trade, because a strait closing is not a discount, it is a stop.
03
Lands at
A cable or a pipeline and the country it comes ashore in. Every landing point, not only the two ends: a cable that lands in eleven countries is a tie to eleven countries.
04
Sited in
A piece of hardware and the country whose territory it stands on. What makes a datacenter somebody's problem.
05
Supplies and depends on
A country and a good it produces more of than it uses, or the reverse. This is the layer that makes the graph conduct across geography rather than along it.
06
Alignment and membership
Which side of the world order a country is counted on, and which treaty organisations it has joined. Weaker ties, because they are weaker ties.
07
Powers and feeds knowledge
Generation and the compute close enough to run on it; compute and the research cluster next to it. Two hops that are real and that a map of dots beside each other cannot show.
A graph of who touches whom is a diagram. What makes this an instrument is that it conducts.
What the impulse actually does
Click any node and it receives a shock of one. Every round, each node passes what it holds along its edges, divided by the total conductance leaving it, multiplied by a decay. What a node ends up holding is how much of the original reached it. The division is the part that matters: without it a hub with three hundred edges would hand out three hundred copies of what it received, and the answer would be that everything reaches everything, which is true of no shock that has ever happened.
A share is a measure of reach, not of damage. What a country does about what reaches it is the simulation's job, not the graph's.
A worked example
Put a shock into the Strait of Hormuz
It reaches the United Arab Emirates at twelve percent, Qatar at eleven, Bahrain at nine and a half, Oman at eight, Iran at seven and Kuwait at six. That ordering is not written down anywhere in this plugin. It falls out of the transit ties, the trade network and the division at every hop.
Put one into Taiwan
It crosses into the Taiwan Strait and the Luzon Strait, the Taiwan Stock Exchange, the Mailiao refinery, the port of Taichung and three subsea cables. Six kinds of entity from one country, which is the reason for holding all of them in one graph rather than in six.
What it will not tell you
How bad any of it is. Reach is not damage, and the graph has no opinion about what a country does when something arrives. That is what the simulation is for, and the two are kept apart on purpose.
Open it and put a shock somewhere
The network is one of the three views, beside the flat map and the globe.
Open the simulator