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The result is amazing! It is just unbelievable how small the world is. Use Bitwise OR operation on these numbers and then recursively do it for one set of friends, and then friends-of-friends, and their friends and so on to find the shortest path. To calculate the average, you find the number with the maximum number of zeroes. If there are n zeros, you can find C*2 n unique numbers. To track, you find the number with the maximum number of zeros. This means ½ n people will have their hash or numbers ending with n zeros. Suppose you assign an integer called Hash to each friend in a group (Read more about Hash Function here ).Īpproximately half of your friends will have even numbers or even hash, whose binary representation would be 0.Ī quarter of them would have the number divisible by 4, giving the binary representation as 00. In its research paper, Facebook mentions that this estimation was done using the Flajolet–Martin algorithm, which is used to find distinct elements in a stream of elements. Six Degrees of Separation Theory meaning analysis The image shows the average of each person. On average, Facebook users are connected by an average of 2.9 to 4.2 degrees of separation.
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In their latest research published in February 2016, this number dropped down to 3.57, with more than 1.59 billion people active on Facebook. In 2011, Facebook and researchers at Cornell computed that the average separation across 721 million people using Facebook was only 3.74. You can check the game at Oracle of Bacon. The huge volume of data collected in the game gave scientists and researchers immense information to process and proceed and gave them opportunities to prove the concept of six degrees of separation. The real breakthrough came with the college game of “Six degrees of Kevin Bacon” where college students linked other Hollywood co-stars to Kevin Bacon in six or fewer steps. The point I am trying to make is that within a span of few hours, a simple XSS webworm was shared among more than 1 million users, proving that the world was getting smaller and further studies and research on small world projects need to be escalated. Though mostly harmless, Samy was caught by the United States Secret Service and was prohibited from using the Internet for three years. It is considered one of the fastest growing web viruses of all time.
#How many degrees of separation code#
Within 20 hours, this code was on more than 1 million myspace user profiles. Whenever anyone visited Samy’s profile, it copied his picture and tag line on his home page saying “Samy is my hero” and also copied the code. In 2005, Samy Kamkar wrote a small piece of code for his myspace account. These experiments suggested that humans are connected to each other through a network, connected to each other by the shortest path. The small world experiment comprised experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram, examining the average path length for social networks of people in the United States. Soon several “small world” projects were conducted.
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This theory captivated millions of mathematicians, sociologists, and physicists and also laid the founding stone of the first online social network. In one of his stories titled Chains, he said that with growing communication and travel, the friendship network would grow irrespective of the distance between two humans.Īnd with a growing social network, the social distance would shrink immensely.Īll the people on the planet could be connected to one another by 5 or fewer people. In 1929, Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy published a volume of short stories named Everything is Different. The math says that in 6 steps you would be connected with 50 6, or 15.62 billion people. Going by the numbers, the idea looks pretty plausible.Īssume that you know 50 people or have 50 friends and these 50 friends of yours know 50 others who are not your friends, and so on. In a world of 7 billion people, it seems hard to believe that the Six Degrees of Separation theory contends that we are all connected to each other by six or fewer acquaintances.įor example, there are, at most, six people standing between you and Tom Cruise or President Obama (or Trump if you lean that way). Do you know was the first social network site which allowed the user to create a profile and connect?
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