NewsDude
08-04-2008, 10:10 PM
If actor Kevin Bacon is reading this, he may want to urge people to expand the game bearing his name -- by playing it with Microsoft's Messenger.
A new study of Messenger's instant-messaging traffic by Microsoft researchers found that the minimum length connecting 180 billion different pairs of users was usually seven or less fellow users.
This supports a popular folk legend that says any two people in the world are connected by "six degrees of separation," which was the title of a popular 1990 play by John Guare and a 1993 film. Similarly, a trivia game known as Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon requires users to connect any film actor in history through the actor's personal connections or history to Kevin Bacon.
Milgram and Travers Study
The play, movie, and Kevin Bacon game were based on the work of academic researchers Stanley Milgram and Jeffrey Travers in the 1960s. They asked people to pass on a letter to another person they knew by name, in order to get it to someone they did not know in another city. In their original research, about 300 people in Boston and Nebraska were asked to get the letter through their acquaintances to a Boston stockbroker.
The average number of people through which a letter passed when it was successfully delivered, Milgram and Travers found, was 6.2 people. Calling it "six degrees of separation" was added later in the play, movie and folklore. But only 64 of the original 296 letters successfully reached the stockbroker target, suggesting that a universal fabric structure for connecting people was not revealed. Additionally, all of the participants were in the United States.
However, Microsoft researcher Eric Horvitz told the Washington Post that his results indicate there may be "a social-connectivity constant for humanity." He added that, while many people have intuitions...
More... (http://www.toptechnews.com/story.xhtml?story_id=61128)
A new study of Messenger's instant-messaging traffic by Microsoft researchers found that the minimum length connecting 180 billion different pairs of users was usually seven or less fellow users.
This supports a popular folk legend that says any two people in the world are connected by "six degrees of separation," which was the title of a popular 1990 play by John Guare and a 1993 film. Similarly, a trivia game known as Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon requires users to connect any film actor in history through the actor's personal connections or history to Kevin Bacon.
Milgram and Travers Study
The play, movie, and Kevin Bacon game were based on the work of academic researchers Stanley Milgram and Jeffrey Travers in the 1960s. They asked people to pass on a letter to another person they knew by name, in order to get it to someone they did not know in another city. In their original research, about 300 people in Boston and Nebraska were asked to get the letter through their acquaintances to a Boston stockbroker.
The average number of people through which a letter passed when it was successfully delivered, Milgram and Travers found, was 6.2 people. Calling it "six degrees of separation" was added later in the play, movie and folklore. But only 64 of the original 296 letters successfully reached the stockbroker target, suggesting that a universal fabric structure for connecting people was not revealed. Additionally, all of the participants were in the United States.
However, Microsoft researcher Eric Horvitz told the Washington Post that his results indicate there may be "a social-connectivity constant for humanity." He added that, while many people have intuitions...
More... (http://www.toptechnews.com/story.xhtml?story_id=61128)