Dillinger
Guerrilla Ontologist
- Joined
- Sep 19, 2000
- Posts
- 26,152
The well known "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" game is actually based on several scientific studies. Most of you probably know how the game works, but here is the concept just in case, along with the historic scientific perspective as to why it works. (Those of you who don't want to read this all can skip to the end where I get to the part about how this relates to Literotica.)
In the mid-1960s the legendary social psychologist Stanley Milgram asked randomly selected citizens of Kansas and Nebraska to try to connect with social "targets" in Massachusetts by mailing letters to likely intermediaries. The average number of links between strangers turned out to be surprisingly small. Milgram claimed we're all connected, on average, by half a dozen interpersonal avenues? a numinous network popularized by the phrase "six degrees of separation."
The original small-world question was posed in the 1960s by political scientist Ithiel de Sola Pool of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and IBM mathematician Manfred Kochen. How many acquaintances, they wondered, connect any two people chosen at random? Kochen and Pool's calculations put the average number at three. Milgram devised an experiment to test that surprising prediction. He recruited volunteer "starters" in Kansas and Nebraska from mailing lists and newspaper ads and told them the name, address, and occupation of a target in Massachusetts. He asked the starters to forward a document to someone they knew on a first-name basis who might be able to reach the target. In a 1967 report of his results, Milgram described how one folder had found its way to the wife of a divinity student in just four days and three steps: from a Kansas wheat farmer to an Episcopal minister, from the minister to a colleague in Cambridge, and thence to the divinity student's wife. In that case, Milgram wrote, "The number of intermediate links between starting person and target person amounted to two!" The average number of intermediates was five? six steps, in other words, connected Milgram's distant strangers.
Support for Milgram's idea has come from another camp as well. In the mid-1990s, mathematician Steve Strogatz of Cornell University and his graduate student Duncan Watts began constructing theoretical models that explained how millions of people could be linked by relatively short social routes. Watts and Strogatz's models show that the members of a big network can be connected by short paths if the network comprises clusters of close associates joined by occasional, far-reaching links? "random" elements in otherwise structured groups.
To test whether such networks actually exist, Watts consulted one of the few impeccably documented social circles known to science: the parlor game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. The game, housed online by the Oracle of Bacon at Virginia Web site and supported by the vast Internet Movie Database, involves finding the shortest route between any given thespian and actor Kevin Bacon. Links are forged by appearing in a movie with Bacon, or with someone who has appeared with Bacon, or with someone who has appeared with someone who has appeared with Bacon, and so on. Among the hundreds of thousands of actors living and dead, the average "Bacon number" is 2.918, and no actor has been found to be more than 10 degrees of separation from Bacon.
Watts learned that the Bacon network conforms to his models of a small world: Groups of closely associated actors are joined by random "linchpins" that link far-flung clusters. Linchpin actors may have long careers, like Green Acres's Eddie Albert, thus joining clusters in time. They may link the films of different cultures, as Bruce Lee does. Or they may span genres, like Nicolas Cage (comedy and suspense). There's reason to believe that ordinary social networks operate according to similar principles, says Watts. And he's found the same kind of connectivity in systems ranging from the neural wiring of a nematode to the electrical power grid of the western United States. Small-world networks may also describe the spread of disease, fads, and social movements.
"Even just a little bit of randomness in any network is going to generate short paths between different nodes," says Watts. "Milgram showed that people can actually find those paths? and that's a different sort of problem. The models we developed to show that these short paths actually exist don't explain how you can find them."
How people recognize the routes to their distant affiliates is the next big small-world question. Computer scientist Jon Kleinberg at Cornell has proposed an algorithm to explain it (although Milgram himself conceded that "there is nothing more alien to mathematically untutored intuition than this form of thinking"). Watts is trying to trace both the reasoning and the routes through an e-mail replication of Milgram's experiment. He's got 50,000 participants so far, with targets in India, Europe, Indonesia, and Australia as well as the United States. "We've already had some globe-crossing chains? from Sydney to Siberia in four links," he says. "It can be done."
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So - based on this I would speculate that the same holds true for those of us here. The odds are very VERY good that, IN THE REAL WORLD, I know someone who knows someone who knows you! You might even know someone who knows someone here. You might even actually know someone here, REAL WORLD, and not even realize it yet.
Or - think about this - for those of us who have talked to other Lit members on the phone. There is a very good chance that you've talked to someone who's talked to someone else here. Or, at least, talked ot someone who has talked to someone who has talked to someone else here.
That is a REAL WORLD connection. So I would speculate that the Six Degrees of Separation average is actually a lot smaller in an online community such as this one. And that most of us are probably separated by no more than two or three degrees of separation.
In the mid-1960s the legendary social psychologist Stanley Milgram asked randomly selected citizens of Kansas and Nebraska to try to connect with social "targets" in Massachusetts by mailing letters to likely intermediaries. The average number of links between strangers turned out to be surprisingly small. Milgram claimed we're all connected, on average, by half a dozen interpersonal avenues? a numinous network popularized by the phrase "six degrees of separation."
The original small-world question was posed in the 1960s by political scientist Ithiel de Sola Pool of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and IBM mathematician Manfred Kochen. How many acquaintances, they wondered, connect any two people chosen at random? Kochen and Pool's calculations put the average number at three. Milgram devised an experiment to test that surprising prediction. He recruited volunteer "starters" in Kansas and Nebraska from mailing lists and newspaper ads and told them the name, address, and occupation of a target in Massachusetts. He asked the starters to forward a document to someone they knew on a first-name basis who might be able to reach the target. In a 1967 report of his results, Milgram described how one folder had found its way to the wife of a divinity student in just four days and three steps: from a Kansas wheat farmer to an Episcopal minister, from the minister to a colleague in Cambridge, and thence to the divinity student's wife. In that case, Milgram wrote, "The number of intermediate links between starting person and target person amounted to two!" The average number of intermediates was five? six steps, in other words, connected Milgram's distant strangers.
Support for Milgram's idea has come from another camp as well. In the mid-1990s, mathematician Steve Strogatz of Cornell University and his graduate student Duncan Watts began constructing theoretical models that explained how millions of people could be linked by relatively short social routes. Watts and Strogatz's models show that the members of a big network can be connected by short paths if the network comprises clusters of close associates joined by occasional, far-reaching links? "random" elements in otherwise structured groups.
To test whether such networks actually exist, Watts consulted one of the few impeccably documented social circles known to science: the parlor game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. The game, housed online by the Oracle of Bacon at Virginia Web site and supported by the vast Internet Movie Database, involves finding the shortest route between any given thespian and actor Kevin Bacon. Links are forged by appearing in a movie with Bacon, or with someone who has appeared with Bacon, or with someone who has appeared with someone who has appeared with Bacon, and so on. Among the hundreds of thousands of actors living and dead, the average "Bacon number" is 2.918, and no actor has been found to be more than 10 degrees of separation from Bacon.
Watts learned that the Bacon network conforms to his models of a small world: Groups of closely associated actors are joined by random "linchpins" that link far-flung clusters. Linchpin actors may have long careers, like Green Acres's Eddie Albert, thus joining clusters in time. They may link the films of different cultures, as Bruce Lee does. Or they may span genres, like Nicolas Cage (comedy and suspense). There's reason to believe that ordinary social networks operate according to similar principles, says Watts. And he's found the same kind of connectivity in systems ranging from the neural wiring of a nematode to the electrical power grid of the western United States. Small-world networks may also describe the spread of disease, fads, and social movements.
"Even just a little bit of randomness in any network is going to generate short paths between different nodes," says Watts. "Milgram showed that people can actually find those paths? and that's a different sort of problem. The models we developed to show that these short paths actually exist don't explain how you can find them."
How people recognize the routes to their distant affiliates is the next big small-world question. Computer scientist Jon Kleinberg at Cornell has proposed an algorithm to explain it (although Milgram himself conceded that "there is nothing more alien to mathematically untutored intuition than this form of thinking"). Watts is trying to trace both the reasoning and the routes through an e-mail replication of Milgram's experiment. He's got 50,000 participants so far, with targets in India, Europe, Indonesia, and Australia as well as the United States. "We've already had some globe-crossing chains? from Sydney to Siberia in four links," he says. "It can be done."
----------------
So - based on this I would speculate that the same holds true for those of us here. The odds are very VERY good that, IN THE REAL WORLD, I know someone who knows someone who knows you! You might even know someone who knows someone here. You might even actually know someone here, REAL WORLD, and not even realize it yet.
Or - think about this - for those of us who have talked to other Lit members on the phone. There is a very good chance that you've talked to someone who's talked to someone else here. Or, at least, talked ot someone who has talked to someone who has talked to someone else here.
That is a REAL WORLD connection. So I would speculate that the Six Degrees of Separation average is actually a lot smaller in an online community such as this one. And that most of us are probably separated by no more than two or three degrees of separation.
