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Yahoo, Facebook Test "Six Degrees of Separation"
An anonymous reader writes "Yahoo has partnered with Facebook to test the iconic social experiment known as 'six degrees of separation' (everyone is on average approximately six steps away from any other person on Earth). The goal of the Small World Experiment is to determine the social path length between two strangers by tapping into the world's largest social network and its 750 million users, each of whom have an average of 130 friends." Looks like a fun project, but not quite as useful as knowing how close you are to Kevin Bacon.
Oh whoops while we were performing this test we accidentally shared a whole bunch of private information with our partners.
The editor should be banished from /. for mentioning the Bacon number and not the Erdos number.
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It's not a travelling salesman problem, it's a shortest path problem, and as such is much easier. For the distance between two specific people, you'd need the Dijkstra algorithm, and for the distance between any two people, you could use Floyd-Warshall. This one is in O(n^3), where n is the number of users; that's a big number, but it's nowhere near the (supposed) complexity of the TSP.
Get help before you end up like Kaczynski.
This has been done before. There used to be a site called Six Degrees, which was a social network that showed your contacts at various distances.
Which was swallowed by Orkut. Which was swallowed by Google.
By the way, the original theory is that six degrees is the _maximum_ distance between any two living humans, not the average.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
I know it sounds like trolling, but you may have a valid point - Facebook knows exactly who is connected and how - they should be easily able to pull a report and see if 6 degrees of separation is true (sure there may be privacy concerns, but they can just add that as an opt-out feature again, not a big deal). This seems like an elaborate/obscure marketing campaign in wake of Google+ :)
Bow before me, for I am root.
Everyone here is bitching about privacy breach, algorithm complexity etc. Actually it has nothing to do with this experiment. From TFA
"Anyone with a Facebook account can participate to verify if everyone is on average approximately six steps away from any other person on Earth. You’ll be asked to select one of your Facebook friends whom you believe is most likely to know the “target person” that has been assigned to you. A message will then be sent from friend to friend until you get it to the “target person.” The goal is to do this in as few steps as possible. "
Basically they are just repeating the old mail experiment, but with a new way of passing messages
- unless you (or one of your friends) participates nothing happens to your privacy
- no computer algorithm is involved
- no problem with celebrity profiles linking thousands of people that now nothing about each other