Facebook Shrinks 'Six Degrees of Separation' to 4.74

[soxxy]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/1...n_1107577.html

The "six degrees" theory was first proposed in the 1920s and put to the test in 1967 by social psychologist Stanley Milgram, who asked 296 people scattered throughout the United States to each send a letter to a specific individual in Boston by routing it through acquaintances they thought were likely to know the person.

I never knew the theory started this far back....although I knew it didn't start with the Kevin Bacon game.

Anyway, what's an "acquaintance"? If you PM someone on FSU who's going to Russia this weekend and ask them to get Mao Asada's autograph for you, and they succeed, how many degress are you separated from Mao?

[Skittl1321]

I would say at the loosest definition the person who got the autograph would be an aquaintance to Mao, in that they have met her, but not by the more common definition that they are loose friends.

However, for the game- I would say 1 degree of seperation - the poster on FSU, who is an online aquaintance. (You don't count yourself, but you do count Mao, right?)

So that means skaters who randomly friend all sorts of people on facebook have a lot of 0 degrees of seperation to lots of random fans.

(that might be 2 and 1 if I have the numbering system wrong. Is it like an Erdos number? Where only Erdos is a 0, and then direct work with him is a 1?)