of another cycle. Also, the node a⁵, which also has order 6, generates the same cycle as does a itself; so we have at least two choices for which element to use in generating a cycle --- often more.

To build a cycle graph for a group, we start with a node for each group element. For each primitive cycle, we then choose some element a that generates that cycle, and we connect the node for e to the one for a, a to a², ..., a^k-1 to a^k, etc., until returning to e. The result is a cycle graph for