NetLogo Efficient way to create fixed number of links

Question

I have about 5000 agents (people) in my model. I want to give them an arbitrary number of friends and have reciprocal but random pairing. So if person A chooses person B the

Answer 1

After debugging (see NetLogo Efficiently create network with arbitrary degree distribution), the following version is relatively efficient. It constructs an agentset (called lonely below) for the turtles that still need links and deletes them as they get enough links. Removing individual turtles is more efficient than the nested process to create the candidate set each time.

The variable nFriends is a global (with a slider in the original model) that is the target number of links, identical for all agents.

  let lonely turtles with [count my-links < nFriends]
  ask turtles
  [ set lonely other lonely
    let new-links nFriends - count my-links
    if new-links > 0
    [ let chosen n-of min (list new-links count lonely) lonely
      create-links-with chosen [ hide-link ]
      ask chosen [ if count my-links = nFriends [ set lonely other lonely ] ]
    ]
  ]