The degree to which a slice is cohesive (C) or tangled (T) is indicated in the levels table.

These quantities are derived as follows:

where #T is the number of tangles (or clusters) in the slice, #T(i) is the ith tangle (or cluster) and N is the number of nodes in the slice.

It is more important to understand the effect of this formula than the formula itself. It was chosen so that the resulting degree would differentiate between (e.g.) a slice where all of the items constituted a single tangle and one where all items were in a tangle, but there were many small tangles. (The former is more serious and much more "tangled".)

As an example, consider a slice of 10 items in 2 scenarios:

Scenario 1, all items are in a single tangle:

T = sqrt(100)/10 = 100%

Scenario 2, there are 2 tangles of 5 items:

T = sqrt(25+25)/10 = 70%