Friday, March 23, 2007

6 degrees of seperation - what a small world

The 6 degrees of seperation is theory stating that any one on earth can reach another person on earth through a chain of acquintances that has no more than 5 poeple in between.
For example, if you want to send a gift to Madona, call somebody you think he/she knows madona! chances are she/he does not know her personally, but then again, that person shall try to contact another person. If the chain continues, the gift is bound to reach Madona after 5 links (contacts). Maybe one can try this through the Linked-In network as well.

The theory was first proposed in 1929 by the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy in a short story called "Chains."

" 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.

Although the participants expected the chain to include at least a hundred intermediaries, it only took (on average) between five and seven intermediaries to get each package delivered. Milgram's findings were published in Psychology Today and inspired the phrase "six degrees of separation."

Read the original article

http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci932596,00.html

ammar sajdi

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