Microsoft proves ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon’ theory to be true
By Dave Parrack
Is the idea of Six Degrees of Separation between every living soul on the planet based in fact or merely folklore? Microsoft has the surprising answer.
Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, or Six degrees of separation to give the theory its original title, is the idea that everyone in the world is connected to everyone else by six acquaintances. So as I sit here, I would know one person who would know another person who, after a further three separations, would know someone famous or important. Or another way of explaining it would be to take two complete strangers and then find five people in a chain that connects them to each other.
The theory has been around for a long time, but the first real attempt at proving it came in a 1969 study by researchers Stanley Milgram and Jeffrey Travers. According to The Telegraph, they asked 296 people to send a letter, via acquaintances, to a Boston stockbroker. Of the letter chains that were completed, the average number of degrees of separation was 6.2.
John Guare’s 1990 play, Six Degrees of Separation, popularized the idea, and then students at Pennsylvania’s Albright College took the idea further in to mainstream popular culture by inventing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, a game that involves linking every film actor to Kevin Bacon.
Now the power of the Internet has proved almost beyond doubt that the theory is correct, and that we are all connected in this way. Microsoft researchers used data from 30 billion instant messages sent through the Windows Live Messenger system during the month of June, 2006. Two people were considered to be acquaintances if they had sent one another an instant message.
Eric Horvitz and Jure Leskovec were the researchers in question, and the 30 billion electronic conversations covered around 180 million people. This means that the study was planetary rather than local, something impossible before the emergence of the Web.
The minimum chain lengths required to connect everyone in the database were then examined and the average was found to be 6.6, with 78% of the pairs able to be connected in seven links or fewer. Which is as near as could possibly be expected to validating the Six Degrees of Separation theory.
I find this amazing news as I always took the Six Degrees idea with a pinch of salt. What this study proves is how small the world is, and how interconnected we all are to each other. The Internet has brought everyone closer together and now I can actually claim to know The Queen… by a separation degree of 6.6.
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