Hasse Diagram - A "good" Hasse Diagram

A "good" Hasse Diagram

Although Hasse diagrams are simple as well as intuitive tools for dealing with finite posets, it turns out to be rather difficult to draw "good" diagrams. The reason is that there will in general be many possible ways to draw a Hasse diagram for a given poset. The simple technique of just starting with the minimal elements of an order and then drawing greater elements incrementally often produces quite poor results: symmetries and internal structure of the order are easily lost.

The following example demonstrates the issue. Consider the power set of a 4-element set ordered by inclusion . Below are four different Hasse diagrams for this partial order. Each subset has a node labelled with a binary encoding that shows whether a certain element is in the subset (1) or not (0):

The first diagram makes clear that the power set is a graded poset. The second diagram has the same graded structure, but by making some edges longer than others, it emphasizes that the 4-dimensional cube is a union of two 3-dimensional cubes. The third diagram shows some of the internal symmetry of the structure. In the fourth diagram the vertices are arranged like the fields of a 4×4 matrix.