Six degrees of separation
Many might know the song named Six degrees of separation by The Script. But this blog is neither about that song nor about that Irish rock band. Your next question will be “Is this blog about the Will Smith’s 1993 movie Six degrees of separation ?” Right ?
Nope…This aint about that movie either.
Then, you must be wondering what the hell am I doing in this blog, right ?
Well, I’ll tell you what. This blog is about a concept named “Six degrees of separation” which was first developed by Frigyes Karinthy in 1929. My entrepreneurship professor explained this concept during the class. That was the first time I heard about this concept and I found it interesting. So, when my professor said to write a blog about any fascinating topic that he taught in the entire course, I pick one “Six degrees of separation”.
The Science of Six degrees of separation
This concept tells that everything in this world are six or fewer steps away from each other so that a chain of “a friend of a friend” statements can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps.
For example, You can connect with Bill Gates, the richest person in the world in just 6 or fewer steps !!
Yesss!!! You heard it right !!
That’s what the concept says. Its not just you who can connect with Bill Gates in 6 or fewer steps, it can be your friend, me or anyone else in this world. This idea was further explained using Small world phenomenon by Stanley Milgram — an American social Psychologist.
Mathematical Model
This concept was also proven mathematically by Watts and Strogatz model. This model shows that the average path length between two nodes in a random network can be defined as follows,
Average path length between 2 nodes = ln N / ln K,
where N = total nodes and K = acquaintances per node
For example, If N = 6,000,000,000 (90% of the World population) and
K = 30
Degrees of Separation = 22.5 / 3.4 = 6.6. (Assume 10% of population is too young to participate.)
Small World Phenomenon
The small world phenomenon is the principle that all people are linked by short chains of acquaintances, ideally six or fewer steps. That is, given any persons A and B; there are a chain of people such that A knows C who knows D who knows E who knows F who knows G who knows H who knows B.
Other examples are the Kevin Bacon game (that every actor can be linked to Kevin Bacon via actors they have acted with) and the Erdos number (related to collaborations on mathematics papers).
The above video by Kevin Bacon will explain how he used the concept “Six degrees of Kevin Bacon” for charitable purposes.
