What would happen if the test was expanded to the planet? The idea was taken up again, this time on a global scale, by Columbia University researchers in a 2003 report of an e-mail experiment. Of those letter chains that were complete, the average number of degrees of separation was 6.2.ДЄll of the subjects were in the US. Only 64 of the original 296 letters reached the stockbroker. The subjects were told to send the letter to an acquaintance who could best advance the letter to the target, but most failed. Their finding was based on asking 296 people in Nebraska and Boston to send a letter through acquaintances to a Boston stockbroker. In an oft-cited 1969 work, they put the figure at 6.2, though they never referred to it as 'degrees of separation'. Its origins lie in the 1960s work of Stanley Milgram and Jeffrey Travers. You are one degree away from everyone you know, two degrees away from everyone they know, and so on.Д«ut proof of the theory has been thin. A 'degree of separation' is a measure of social distance between people. The Microsoft research focused on the popular concept that has inspired games such as Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon and a well-known play and film by John Guare. Stripped of text messages and personally identifiable information, the records indicate users' location and patterns of contact. In recent years, the massive databases yielded by mobile phone records have been exploited by researchers to understand human movements and social networks better. What we're seeing suggests there may be a social connectivity constant for humanity,' said Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft researcher who conducted the study with colleague Jure Leskovec. The database covered all of the Microsoft Messenger instant-messaging network in June 2006, or roughly half the world's instant-messaging traffic at that time, researchers said. With records of 30 billion electronic conversations among 180 million people from around the world, researchers have concluded that any two people on average are distanced by just 6.6 degrees of separation, meaning that they could be linked by a string of seven or fewer acquaintances. The so-called small world theory, embodied in the old saw that there are just 'six degrees of separation' between any two strangers on Earth, has been largely corroborated by a massive study of electronic communication.

Six degrees of separation meaning