Six degrees of separation is the idea that all people are six or fewer social connections away from each other. As a result, a chain of "friend of a friend" statements can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps. It is also known as the six handshakes rule.[1]
This idea influenced a great deal of early thought on social networks, both directly and indirectly. Karinthy has been regarded as the originator of the notion of six degrees of separation.[3]A related theory deals with the quality of connections, rather than their existence. The theory of three degrees of influence was created by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler.[citation needed]
Michael Gurevich conducted seminal work in his empirical study of the structure of social networks in his 1961 Massachusetts Institute of Technology PhD dissertation under Ithiel de Sola Pool.[6] Mathematician Manfred Kochen, an Austrian who had been involved in urban design, extrapolated these empirical results in a mathematical manuscript, Contacts and Influences,[7] 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 Monte Carlo 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 Stanley Milgram.[citation needed]
Milgram continued Gurevich's experiments in acquaintanceship networks at Harvard University. Kochen and de Sola Pool's manuscript, Contacts and Influences,[8] was conceived while both were working at the University of Paris 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 Their unpublished manuscript circulated among academics for over 20 years before publication in 1978.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 Paris, leading to the experiments reported in The Small World Problem [9] in popular science journal Psychology Today, with a more rigorous version of the paper appearing in Sociometry two years later.[10]
This circle of researchers was fascinated by the interconnectedness and "social capital" of human networks. Milgram's study results showed that people in the United States 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 Karinthy 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" was John Guare, who attributed the concept of six degrees to Marconi.[11]
Several studies, such as Milgram's small-world experiment, 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.[14]
It has been suggested by some commentators[19] that interlocking networks of computer-mediated lateral communication could diffuse single messages to all interested users worldwide as per the six degrees of separation principle via information routing groups, which are networks specifically designed to exploit this principle and lateral diffusion.
Bakhshandeh et al.[20] 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 2 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.
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 Chinese water torture 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.[21]
Guare, in interviews, attributed his awareness of the "six degrees" to Marconi.[citation needed] 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."[citation needed] Following Guare's lead, many future television and film sources later incorporated the notion into their stories.[citation needed]
A Facebook platform application named "Six Degrees" was developed by Karl Bunyan, which calculates the degrees of separation between people. It had over 5.8 million users, as seen from the group's page. The average separation for all users of the application is 5.73 degrees, whereas the maximum degree of separation is 12. The application has a "Search for Connections" window to input any name of a Facebook user, to which it then shows the chain of connections. In June 2009, Bunyan shut down the application, presumably for issues with Facebook's caching policy; specifically, the policy prohibited the storing of friend lists for more than 24 hours; following this policy would have made the application inaccurate.[29] A new version of the application became available at Six Degrees after Karl Bunyan gave permission to a group of developers led by Todd Chaffee to re-develop the application based on Facebook's revised policy on caching data.[30][31]
Yahoo! Research Small World Experiment has been conducting an experiment and everyone with a Facebook account can take part in it. According to the research page, this research has the potential of resolving the still unresolved theory of six degrees of separation.[23][33]
The LinkedIn professional networking site operates the degree of separation one is away from a person with which he or she wishes to communicate. On LinkedIn, 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 users how many connections they and any other user have in common.
SixDegrees.com was an early social-networking website that existed from 1997 to 2000. 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.[39] However, it was closed in 2000.[40]
The concept of six degrees of separation is often represented by a graph database, a type of NoSQL database that uses graph theory to store, map and query relationships. Real-world applications of the theory include power grid mapping and analysis, disease transmission mapping and analysis, computer circuitry design and search engine ranking.
Although participants in the small-world experiment expected the chain to include at least a hundred intermediaries, it only took on average between five and seven intermediaries for each package to be delivered successfully. Milgram's findings of the small-world project were published in Psychology Today and inspired the phrase "six degrees of separation." Playwright John Guare popularized the phrase when he chose it as the title for his 1990 play.
Milgram's findings were discounted after it was discovered he had based his conclusion on a small number of packages. However, six degrees of separation became an accepted notion in popular culture after Brett C. Tjaden published a computer game on the University of Virginia's website based on the small-world problem.
In 2016, researchers at Facebook reported that the social media and networking site had reduced the chain length of Facebook users to three and a half degrees of separation. Dutch mathematician Edsger Dijkstra is credited with developing the algorithm in 1956 that made it possible for Facebook researchers and others to find the shortest path between two nodes in a graph database.
How can I construct a query like this (even if I can't show the level of separation and only get a mutual count)? Right now, I can sort of think of something but it involves query after query some nested in loops, and yea, I just can't picture that being anything good for my servers' overall performance or health over time.
Not sure this is exactly what you are looking for, but sounds similar to other "social network" finding friends/associations. As for how many "degrees" from a person's association/friendship, you would probably have to nest your queries, or at least keep querying from within some looping structure.
Our study points out that evolutionary rules of the kind traditionally associated with human cooperation and altruism can in fact account also for the emergence of the six degrees of separation in social networks.
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