" The challenge now is to decode the underlying meaning of small-world and scale-free architecture, if there is any. In one recent attempt, Solé has observed that electronic circuits tend to be wired in a small-world fashion, and he thinks he knows why. Whether he was analyzing the latest digital microchips or the clunky circuits found in old televisions, he found that all the components were just a few electrical steps from one another, yet they were much more clustered than they would have been in an equivalent random circuit, thanks to the modular design favored by engineering practice. "

― Steven H. Strogatz , Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order