The six degrees of separation theory claims that each person on this planet is connected to every other person through six other people. This just goes on to prove that the world is indeed a small place and one is very likely to come across someone they know, either directly or through their acquaintances in the most unlikely of places. However, Facebook has just upended this theory, saying that world is more closely connected than you might think. According to facebook, the six degrees of separation has now been reduced to mere 3.5 degrees.
After studying 1.59 billion people active on the social networking website, the team determined that the number is actually 3.57 — meaning thereby that there is actually “three-and-a-half degrees of separation” where each person in the world is connected to every other person by an average of three-and-a-half other people. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is 3.17 degrees of separation from all Facebook users. According to researchers, our collective “degrees of separation” have shrunk over the past five years.
A simple way to understand this major change would be through an example. Imagine a person with 100 friends. If each of his friends also has 100 friends, then the number of friends-of-friends will be 10,000. If each users’ friends-of-friends also has 100 friends then the number of friends-of-friends-of-friends will be 1,000,000. Some of those friends may overlap, so we need to filter down to the unique connections. Rather than calculate it exactly, the study relied on statistical algorithms to estimate distances with great accuracy, basically finding the approximate number of people within 1, 2, 3 and so on.
The average distance we observe is 4.57, corresponding to 3.57 intermediaries or degrees of separation. Within the US, people are connected to each other by an average of 3.46 degrees, the post added.
