A playful note on spanning and surplus edges

13 pages, 7 figuresConsider a (not necessarily near-critical) random graph running in continuous time. A recent breadth-first-walk construction is extended in order to account for the surplus edge data in addition to the spanning edge data. Two different graph representations of the multiplicative coalescent, with different advantages and drawbacks, are discussed in detail. A canonical multi-graph of Bhamidi, Budhiraja and Wang (2014) naturally emerges. The presented framework should facilitate understanding of scaling limits with surplus edges for near-critical random graphs in the domain of attraction of general (not necessarily standard) eternal multiplicative coalescent