Figure 2

Circuits in interaction graphs. A circuit in the interaction graph is a closed sequence of oriented edges in which no edge is traversed more than once. In the figure shown here, there exists a circuit from species X to species Y (along the lower edge) and back to X (along the upper edge). The sign of the circuit is the product of the signs of the included edges, and can be positive (A and B), negative (C), or variable (D), in which case the sign changes with the circuit's location in phase space. Self-loops, which can also be positive or negative, are shown in gray.