Patent Citation Network Grower with Preferential Attachment

This simulation grows a patent citation network live, one patent at a time, using the real preferential-attachment rule from network science (Price's model, the precursor to the Barabási–Albert model): every new patent cites a small number of existing patents chosen with probability proportional to how many citations those patents have already received. Watch a handful of "landmark" patents pull ahead in citation count while most patents stay small, and follow the live log–log plot as the citation-count distribution converges toward a real power law — the same statistical signature economists and network scientists find in actual patent-citation data.