However, it does help you understand just what ‘exponential rate’ means. We’re all six degrees away from Kevin Bacon.
If every person in the world knows somebody who knows somebody who’s on Facebook, we’re only at 5.57, and I wouldn’t call that a stretch. Research has yielded that the actual interconnectedness for Facebook users is only 3.57, see here. So, yeah, this doesn’t do anything in practice, unless you manage to leverage your connections somehow.Īnyway, we know the model doesn’t play nice with things like iron curtains and isolated tribes, but how well it fits with the real world is hard to find out. For example, I learned last year I’m only two steps removed from John Scalzi,which makes me that much closer to getting a book published (I wish). Still, the idea is nice, and has merit, especially in our interconnected modern world. We know such tribes of people still exist, mostly in the Amazon. For example, a completely isolated tribe of people will void the whole theory. The distribution in the graph as described above isn’t overly realistic. That disregards the 10% of the population deemed to young, but okay, it more or less fits theoretically. If you take an interconnected graph of N nodes, with K interconnections per node, the result for 6 billion nodes and 30 interconnections per node does indeed yield a value of 6.6 – which would round to 7. Of course, that sounds nice, but is it true? At the very least there is a mathematical foundation. So, how do you link to Kevin Bacon? Well, you should know somebody, who knows somebody, who knows somebody, up to six times until you reach Kevin Bacon. The idea is that any two people in the world are separated by at most six handshakes, or more accurately, steps of social connections. The game is based on interconnection, and specifically, the six degrees of separation theory. The Kevin Bacon game has gained fame as Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. You can play a similar game with Spotify, by finding the shortest number of clicks to reach from artist A to B.
#SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION KEVIN BACON MOVIE#
Pick an actor, then find the shortest route through cast lists from that actor to a movie with Kevin Bacon.