Six Degrees of Separation

The world is ever changing… so are the people… so are my interests… but the pace with which my interests keep changing or rather pace with which I get bored of things really scares my husband ;) (he is afraid I would follow the same with himJ)… juz kidding). Sometimes I am so much into books, sometimes into workouts, sometimes into puzzles, sometimes into sudoku and sometimes into blogs. Being into it doesn’t mean just noticing from outside the well, it is diving into the well. I still remember those days when I got so much obsessed with SuDoKu, I even forgot cooking and stayed the whole day solving SuDoKu (which made my husband very angry). Ofcourse each obsession doesn’t last for long… and for those of you who want to know… my latest obsession is Orkut.

Orkut is an online community that connects people through a network of trusted friends. There are lots of cool features in it that makes you sit on it for hours… and I am sure this is the case with most of you. The most interesting thing is, it gives you the shortest tree and you would be surprised to see that the person with whom you have started the tree would no more exist when the shortest tree is shown.

Here comes into picture the six degrees separation. Six degrees of separation is the hypothesis that anyone on Earth can be connected to any other person on the planet through a chain of acquaintances with no more than five intermediaries. Suppose take any two persons say x and y from any part of the world, according to this hypothesis there would be only 5 intermediaries between the two, that means only five links. This hypothesis was first proposed in 1929, later in 1950’s this was tried to prove mathematically but any satisfying results were not obtained. Later in 1967 this hypothesis was tried to prove again with a different approach by a psychologist. This hypothesis was proved to be correct in 80% of the cases.

Six degrees of separation was really hard to believe, I was so happy that it remained a hypothesis not a theory. But when I started to experiment with Orkut, I was shocked to notice that even when I click on any strangers profile there would be 5 or less intermediaries in 90% of the cases and with only 9 friends in my friends list. I tried going to different communities like Dairymilk, Aishwarya Rai, Dilbert and was shocked to notice that any member I pick up randomly in the community is not more than five links away from me. Five is the maximum, in 80% of the cases it is less than five. Then I got curious and picked up the communities where I have least chance to have a link like Armenian girls… to my surprise even here this hypothesis worked…then I got even more curious and enthusiastic and tried to pick up communities from remote foreign countries where I thought there would be no chance of having just five links. Now here in most of the cases there were no links at all… and if there were links existing that would surely be five or below. But then came a point in my mind, according to wikipedia there are 25,132,531 users on Orkut as of August 9, 2006; this would be less than 1% of the world population. This surely shrinks our chances of six degree separation. Well this hypothesis can be instantly proved wrong when we consider our ancestors six or more generations above us since human race has 30-32 generations of ancestry.

Well no doubt why it remained a hypothesis not a theory, but I found it interesting and true in almost 90% of the cases. May be this can be defined in a newer way and proved.

Now I know the world is really small.