Six Degrees of
Separation down to 3.5
If
data released by Facebook is to be believed, the famous “Six degrees of
Separation" theory is set to change. Facebook has just upended this theory
that every person on this planet is connected to everyone else by six other
people, meaning that the world is more closely connected than we have ever
thought.
After
the results of a massive study went public, it has been established that there
is actually "three and a half degrees of separation" where each
person in the world is connected to every other person by an average of
three-and-a-half other people.
Mark
Zuckerberg has released this finding after his company concluded a study of
1.59 billion people active on the social networking website.
The
stuff can be explained as follows:
Imagine
a person with 100 friends. If each of his friends also has 100 friends, then
the number of friends-of-friends will be 10,000.
If
each of those friends-of-friends also has 100 friends then the number of
friends-of-friends-of-friends will be 1,000,000.
Some
of those friends may certainly overlap, so to filter down to unique connections,
statistical algorithms are used to estimate distances with great accuracy,
basically finding the approximate number of people within 1, 2, 3 (and so on)
hopping away from a source.
For
the theory now stands modified, due credit stands for Hungarian playwright
Frigyes Karinthy in 1929 who coined "Six degrees of Separation".