6 Degrees of Separation
In this video, Veritasium discusse the idea of 6 degrees of seperation. He begins my talking about the (in?)famous Samy worm from MySpace. Samy wrote some code for his MySpace page. If anyone viewed Samy’s profile, the code would would have the visitor’s profile display “Samy is my hero” as well infecting the visitor’s profile. Thus, anyone visiting the original visitor’s page would also have their profile display “Samy is my hero” and be infected. Within 18hrs, Samy has infected over 1 million MySpace pages. The video then goes on to illustrate 6 Degrees in several ways: the Milgram experiment, 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon, Facebook’s friend analysis, and the Strength of Weak ties.
This video directly relates to our discussions of networks and the global friendship network early in the class. One interesting point mentioned in the video was the near-inevitability of 6 degrees. Suppose you have 44 unique friends/acquaintances (a very big underestimate, given the 150 number presented in lecture). Now suppose each of those friends have 44 unique friends. Each of those friends’ friends have 44 unique friends. Within 6 steps, we will have covered 7.25B unique people. Obviously the idea of every friend having no friends in common is very implausible, the idea still holds. Another interesting aspect pointed out is a high degree of clustering AND a high degree of connectedness. This, too, was explained in class by the fact that a lot of people have 1 or 2 random acquaintances outside of their own cluster.
The video ends with a challenge: try to get a message to Veritasium by messaging someone you think might know him. The challenge is considered successful if you reach Veritasium within 6 days with 6 steps or less. The rewards of said challenge have long since expired, but I have still messaged a friend to take on the challenge out of pure curiosity. There is already a path I foresee (mostly through a chain of YouTube channels that have collaborated with each other, since I have 2-degrees of separation from a major channel). If the challenge is completed, I will update the path below.