I hope you know what you’re doing. The use of strcpy here is both unnecessary and unsafe. It’s unnecessary because you don’t need to copy the string and it’s unsafe because your character buffer “matrix_name” might not be big enough to hold the name. This is a security hole (buffer overflow).

2) Yes. The distance measure is the Hamming distance that we used once already. I checked to see how different LAZ networks were from each other, and if distance equated to differences in CEG response. The answer was no (go figure!), but that’s probably because there is a very nonlinear relationship between topology and response. Also, the distance measure is not at all straightforward, since there are no homologies between networks, i.e. there are no real species from one network to the next. So what I did was to calculate all possible Hamming distances between species in the same guilds between different networks. Then select the minimum distance. This is complicated by my new idea of network equivalence, because now we’re not just calculating distances based on guild membership, but across the entire network! Is possible, no?

Second, would network-o-space be useful here as well? If there is a consistent relationship between topology and response, and network-o-space is a representation of similarities in response between communities, it seems like we should be able to show that proximity in network-o-space will be a proxy for topological similarity, right? In that case, could we use something like the network-o-space equivalent of something like procrustes distance as a measure of topological similarity?