For those who have not known this term....6 degrees
seperation...here's what it mean....
Six degrees of separation is the theory that anyone on the
planet can be connected to any other person on the planet through a
chain of acquaintances that has no more than five intermediaries.
The theory was first proposed in 1929 by the Hungarian writer
Frigyes Karinthy in a short story called "Chains."
an Experiments
In 1967, American sociologist Stanley Milgram devised a new way
to test the theory, which he called "the small-world problem." He
randomly selected people in the mid-West to send packages to a
stranger located in Massachusetts. The senders knew the recipient's
name, occupation, and general location. They were instructed to
send the package to a person they knew on a first-name basis who
they thought was most likely, out of all their friends, to know the
target personally. That person would do the same, and so on, until
the package was personally delivered to its target recipient.
the..............6th connections.
In 2001, Duncan Watts, a professor at Columbia University,
continued his own earlier research into the phenomenon and
recreated Milgram's experiment on the Internet. Watts used an
e-mail message as the "package" that needed to be delivered, and
surprisingly, after reviewing the data collected by 48,000 senders
and 19 targets (in 157 countries), Watts found that the average
number of intermediaries was indeed, six. Watts' research, and the
advent of the computer age, has opened up new areas of inquiry
related to six degrees of separation in diverse areas of network
theory such as as power grid analysis, disease transmission, graph
theory, corporate communication, and computer circuitry.
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