12, 2006 — - Most people have heard of the 'six degrees of separation' theory - the idea that everyone in the world is separated from everyone else by six links.
An arctic showing the number of degrees of separation of the animals from phyto-plankton – for example, capelin are 4 connections away from phyto-planktonSix degrees of separation is the idea that all people are six, or fewer, social connections away from each other. Also known as the 6 Handshakes rule. As a result, a chain of ' statements can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps. It was originally set out by in 1929 and popularized in an eponymous written.
It is sometimes generalized to the average being in the size of the population. Contents.Early conceptions Shrinking world Theories on optimal design of cities, city traffic flows, neighborhoods, and demographics were in vogue after. These conjectures were expanded in 1929 by author, who published a volume of short stories titled Everything is Different. One of these pieces was titled 'Chains,' or 'Chain-Links.'
The story investigated – in abstract, conceptual, and fictional terms – many of the problems that would captivate future generations of mathematicians, sociologists, and physicists within the field of network theory. Due to technological advances in communications and travel, friendship networks could grow larger and span greater distances.
In particular, Karinthy believed that the modern world was 'shrinking' due to this ever-increasing connectedness of human beings. He posited that despite great physical distances between the globe's individuals, the growing density of human networks made the actual social distance far smaller.As a result of this hypothesis, Karinthy's characters believed that any two individuals could be connected through at most five acquaintances. In his story, the characters create a game out of this notion. He wrote:A fascinating game grew out of this discussion. One of us suggested performing the following experiment to prove that the population of the Earth is closer together now than they have ever been before.
We should select any person from the 1.5 billion inhabitants of the Earth – anyone, anywhere at all. He bet us that, using no more than five individuals, one of whom is a personal acquaintance, he could contact the selected individual using nothing except the network of personal acquaintances.This idea both directly and indirectly influenced a great deal of early thought on. Karinthy has been regarded as the originator of the notion of six degrees of separation.A related theory deals with the quality of connections, rather than their existence. The theory of was created by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H.
Small world. Main article:Michael Gurevich conducted seminal work in his empirical study of the structure of social networks in his 1961 PhD dissertation under. Mathematician, an Austrian who had been involved in urban design, extrapolated these empirical results in a mathematical manuscript, concluding that in a U.S.-sized population without social structure, 'it is practically certain that any two individuals can contact one another by means of at most two intermediaries.
In a socially structured population it is less likely but still seems probable. And perhaps for the whole world's population, probably only one more bridging individual should be needed.' They subsequently constructed simulations based on Gurevich's data, which recognized that both weak and strong acquaintance links are needed to model social structure. The simulations, carried out on the relatively limited computers of 1973, were nonetheless able to predict that a more realistic three degrees of separation existed across the U.S.
Population, foreshadowing the findings of American psychologist. Milgram continued Gurevich's experiments in acquaintanceship networks at in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S. Kochen and de Sola Pool's manuscript, Contacts and Influences, was conceived while both were working at the in the early 1950s, during a time when Milgram visited and collaborated in their research.
Their unpublished manuscript circulated among academics for over 20 years before publication in 1978. It formally articulated the mechanics of social networks, and explored the mathematical consequences of these (including the degree of connectedness). The manuscript left many significant questions about networks unresolved, and one of these was the number of degrees of separation in actual social networks. Milgram took up the challenge on his return from, leading to the experiments reported in The Small World Problem in popular science journal, with a more rigorous version of the paper appearing in two years later. The Psychology Today article generated enormous publicity for the experiments, which are well known today, long after much of the formative work has been forgotten.Milgram's article made famous his 1967 set of experiments to investigate de Sola Pool and Kochen's 'small world problem.' Mathematician, born in, growing up in then, was aware of the Statist, and was also a colleague of de Sola Pool, Kochen and Milgram at the University of Paris during the early 1950s (Kochen brought Mandelbrot to work at the Institute for Advanced Study and later IBM in the U.S.).
This circle of researchers was fascinated by the interconnectedness and 'social capital' of human networks. Milgram's study results showed that people in the seemed to be connected by approximately three friendship links, on average, without speculating on global linkages; he never actually used the term 'six degrees of separation.' Since the Psychology Today article gave the experiments wide publicity, Milgram, Kochen, and all had been incorrectly attributed as the origin of the notion of six degrees; the most likely popularizer of the term 'six degrees of separation' would be, who attributed the value '6' to.
Continued research: Small World Project In 2003, conducted an analogous experiment on social connectedness amongst Internet email users. Their effort was named the Columbia Small World Project, and included 24,163 e-mail chains, aimed at 18 targets from 13 countries. Almost 100,000 people registered, but only 384 (0.4%) reached the final target. Amongst the successful chains, while shorter lengths were more common some reached their target after only 7, 8, 9 or 10 steps. Noted that participants (all of whom volunteers) were strongly biased towards existing models of Internet users and that connectedness based on professional ties was much stronger than those within families or friendships. The authors cite 'lack of interest' as the predominating factor in the high attrition rate, a finding consistent with earlier studies.
Research Several studies, such as, have been conducted to measure this connectedness empirically. The phrase 'six degrees of separation' is often used as a synonym for the idea of the 'small world' phenomenon.However, detractors argue that Milgram's experiment did not demonstrate such a link, and the 'six degrees' claim has been decried as an 'academic '. Also, the existence of isolated groups of humans, for example the and other native Brazilian populations, would tend to invalidate the strictest interpretation of the hypothesis.Computer networks In 2001, a professor at, attempted to recreate Milgram's experiment on the Internet, using an e-mail message as the 'package' that needed to be delivered, with 48,000 senders and 19 targets (in 157 countries). Watts found that the average (though not maximum) number of intermediaries was around six.A 2007 study by and examined a data set of instant messages composed of 30 billion conversations among 240 million people.
They found the average path length among Microsoft Messenger users to be 6.It has been suggested by some commentators that interlocking networks of computer mediated lateral communication could diffuse single messages to all interested users worldwide as per the 6 degrees of separation principle via Information Routing Groups, which are networks specifically designed to exploit this principle and lateral diffusion.An optimal algorithm to calculate degrees of separation in social networks Bakhshandeh et al. Have addressed the search problem of identifying the degree of separation between two users in social networks such as Twitter. They have introduced new search techniques to provide optimal or near optimal solutions. The experiments are performed using Twitter, and they show an improvement of several orders of magnitude over greedy approaches. Their optimal algorithm finds an average degree of separation of 3.43 between two random Twitter users, requiring an average of only 67 requests for information over the Internet to Twitter. A near-optimal solution of length 3.88 can be found by making an average of 13.3 requests.Popularization No longer limited strictly to academic or philosophical thinking, the notion of six degrees recently has become influential throughout.
Further advances in communication technology – and particularly the Internet – have drawn great attention to social networks and human interconnectedness. As a result, many popular media sources have addressed the term. The following provide a brief outline of the ways such ideas have shaped popular culture.Popularization of offline practice John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation. Main articles: andAmerican playwright wrote a play in 1990 and released a 1993 film that popularized it; it is Guare's most widely known work.
The play ruminates upon the idea that any two individuals are connected by at most five others. As one of the characters states:I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet. The President of the United States, a gondolier in Venice, just fill in the names.
I find it A) extremely comforting that we're so close, and B) like that we're so close because you have to find the right six people to make the right connection. I am bound to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people.Guare, in interviews, attributed his awareness of the 'six degrees' to Marconi. Although this idea had been circulating in various forms for decades, it is Guare's piece that is most responsible for popularizing the phrase 'six degrees of separation.' Following Guare's lead, many future television and film sources would later incorporate the notion into their stories. , the executive producer of television series and, played the role of Doug in the film adaptation of this play. Many of the play's themes are apparent in his television shows (see below).
Kevin Bacon game The game ' was invented as a play on the concept: the goal is to link any actor to through no more than six connections, where two actors are connected if they have appeared in a movie or commercial together. It was created by three students at in Pennsylvania, who came up with the concept while watching. On September 13, 2012, Google made it possible to search for any given actor's 'Bacon Number' through their search engine.Upon the arrival of the 4G mobile network in the United Kingdom, Kevin Bacon appears in several commercials for the Network in which he links himself to several well known celebrities and TV shows in the UK.John L. Sullivan An early version involved former world Heavyweight boxing champion, in which people would ask others to 'shake the hand that shook the hand that shook the hand that shook the hand of 'the great John L.' ' In popular culture Films. The Oscar-winning film is based on the concept of Six Degrees of Separation.
The lives of all of the characters were intimately intertwined, although they did not know each other and lived thousands of miles from each other. is a 1993 drama film featuring, and.Games. One of the achievements in the video game is called 'Six Degrees of Schafer,' after the concept and, who was presumably in the handful of players to have the achievement as of the game's release. A player can only obtain this achievement by playing online with someone who already has it, further paralleling it to the concept.
One of the merits in the video game is called “domino.” The merit requires you to attack a person online who already has the merit.Literature. and by are trivia books based upon the idea of 'Six Degrees' of information; that everything is connected.Music. The song 'Full Circle' has a central theme dealing with six degrees of separation. ' is the 10th track on the second disc of the 2016 double album by American country artist. It is the 22nd track overall. ' is the 2nd track on 's third album,.
'Six Degrees' is the sixth track on ' album,. is a 2002 album by progressive rock band. is a 2016 song by Italian singer. A bilingual English and Italian version of the song called 'No Degree of Separation' represented in the held in,.Television. is a 2006 television series on in the US. Distances as reported in Feb 2016Facebook reported that the distance had decreased to 4.57 in February 2016, when it had 1.6 billion users (about 22% of the world population). LinkedIn The professional networking site operates the degree of separation one is away from a person with which he or she wishes to communicate.
On, one's network is made up of 1st-degree, 2nd-degree, and 3rd-degree connections and fellow members of LinkedIn Groups. In addition, LinkedIn notifies the user how many connections they and any other user have in common.SixDegrees.com was an early social-networking website that existed from 1997 to 2001. It allowed users to list friends, family members and acquaintances, send messages and post bulletin board items to people in their first, second, and third degrees, and see their connection to any other user on the site. At its height, it had 3,500,000 fully registered members. However, it was closed in 2000.Twitter Users on Twitter can follow other users creating a network. According to a study of 5.2 billion such relationships by social media monitoring firm, the average distance on Twitter is 4.67. On average, about 50% of people on Twitter are only four steps away from each other, while nearly everyone is five steps or less away.In another work, researchers have shown that the average distance of 1,500 random users in Twitter is 3.435.
They calculated the distance between each pair of users using all the active users in Twitter. Mathematics Mathematicians use an analogous notion of: two persons are linked if they are coauthors of an article. The collaboration distance with mathematician Paul Erdős is called the. And Erdős-Bacon-Sabbath (EBS) numbers are further extensions of the same thinking.showed that the average path length between two nodes in a is equal to ln N / ln K, where N = total nodes and K = acquaintances per node. Thus ifN = 300,000,000 (90% of the US population) and K = 30 then Degrees of Separation = 19.5 / 3.4 = 5.7 and if N = 6,000,000,000 (90% of the World population) and K = 30 then Degrees of Separation = 22.5 / 3.4 = 6.6.(Assume 10% of population is too young to participate.)Psychology A 2007 article published in The Industrial-Organizational Psychologist, by Jesse S.
Michel from Michigan State University, applied Stanley Milgram's small world phenomenon (i.e., “small world problem”) to the field of through co-author publication linkages. Following six criteria, Scott Highhouse (Bowling Green State University professor and fellow of the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology) was chosen as the target. Co-author publication linkages were determined for (1) top authors within the I-O community, (2) quasi-random faculty members of highly productive I-O programs in North America, and (3) publication trends of the target. Results suggest that the small world phenomenon is alive and well with mean linkages of 3.00 to top authors, mean linkages of 2.50 to quasi-random faculty members, and a relatively broad and non-repetitive set of co-author linkages for the target. The author then provided a series of implications and suggestions for future research.See also. – Mathematical operation., a TV documentary that follows a similar concept but involving history and science.
– Closeness of someone's association with mathematician Paul Erdős. – Closeness of someone's association with mathematician Paul Erdős and actor Kevin Bacon. – Parlour game on degrees of separation. – Charity led by actor, musician, and philanthropist Kevin Bacon. – Experiments examining the average path length for social networks. – Social structure made up of a set of social actors. by Malcolm Gladwell.
– 1993 American comedy-drama film by Fred Schepisi.Notes.
5 min readDec. 12, 2006 -Most people have heard of the 'six degrees of separation' theory - the idea that everyone in the world is separated from everyone else by six links.But is the notion just a pop culture myth or a fact of life?See how 'Primetime's' experiment played out on 'Basic Instincts: The Human Chain' Wednesday, Dec. 13 at 10 p.m. Primetime' resolved to find out by conducting a groundbreaking social experiment. With the help of Columbia University professor Duncan Watts, 'Primetime' created a test that pitted real people against each other in a race to see who could connect themselves to a random third individual the fastest, and do it in an unusual way.It's a Small World After AllFor a number of years, Watts has studied Network Theory, the scientific field that examines how networks form and how they work in society. Network Theory covers many subjects, including how people interact socially, how diseases spread, how people find jobs, and even how aspects of the World Wide Web operate.'
You may think that you're sort of locked away in your little part of the world,' Watts said. 'In fact, you're not.
Everyone is connected in some way or another.' As widespread as the notion of six degrees has become since it was hatched in the 1960s and has since become the subject of a play and movie, there has been very little effort to try to prove whether the hypothesis is true. Watts himself has led one of the most significant experiments, Columbia's Small World Project.The Small World Project is carried out online. In the experiment, each participant, or 'searcher,' is assigned a random 'target,' one of 18 people around the world. Their job is to link to this person via e-mail.
But there's a catch - they can't just send an e-mail directly to the target, they must connect by creating a human chain.First, the participant e-mails someone they know. They ask that person to continue the links by e-mailing someone else they know. The hope is to eventually send an e-mail to someone who knows the target personally, completing the chain.Some 60,000 people from 170 countries have taken part in the experiment. Of the hundreds of chains that have been completed, Watts says the average number of links has been six, supporting the six degrees of separation theory.But Watts admits there are built-in biases to his work. First, it may be true the majority of most people who participate in the Small World Project are of the same social class, and some say it's easy to connect the searcher with the target if both are college educated or middle class.Expanding the ExperimentThe 'Primetime' experiment went beyond the previous limits.
With Watts' help, 'Primetime' set up the test so that the participants would not just be strangers, but would literally come from different worlds.To see if people could connect across class, race, economics and geography, 'Primetime' started out by locating volunteers who would be at opposite ends of the social spectrum.Kristina Stewart Ward is the editor of Hampton Style magazine, which chronicles the lives of the rich and famous people who congregate in New York's high society summer playground. She has a home in the Hamptons herself as well as on Manhattan's fashionable Upper East Side.Darren Schick grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania but now also lives in Manhattan, where he sells expensive china and crystal stemware to some of the nation's top retailers.When Ward and Schick met for the experiment, 'Primetime' told them that they were about to compete. Both were going to try to connect with someone they had never met.But connecting to that person didn't mean finding them - that would have been too easy. The challenge was to link up by creating a human chain of contacts that ended with their 'target,' a man named Petey Pierre.The Improbable TargetPierre lives in Bedford Stuyvesant, also known as Bed-Stuy, a neighborhood of Brooklyn that has little in common with the areas Ward and Schick call home. In a region ripe with economic depression, Pierre has been trying to make a name for himself as an amateur boxer.'
Primetime' showed a picture of Pierre to Ward and Schick and asked them a simple question: Do you know this man? Both said no.' Primetime' showed Pierre a picture of the two people who were about to start searching for him.
Though Pierre said Schick 'looks like a Spanish guy from 'The Young and the Restless,' and Ward 'is all right looking,' he had never them either.Asked if he thought Ward and Schick could connect with him just by building a chain of their friends and acquaintances, Pierre shot back, 'No way, I think it's impossible. It's like 100 degrees of separation right there.' But Ward and Schick were much more optimistic. Each felt sure they could accomplish the task.According to 'Primetime's' rules, the winner of the contest would be the person who connected to Pierre in the fewest number of steps. Was six degrees all that separated them?
Were the links fewer or much more? Or was a connection established at all?What played out in the experiment took both Ward and Schick through surprising twists and turns.