Take part in the 6 Degrees of Separation Experiment at http://smallworld.sandbox.yahoo.com/.
As the world became more technologically advanced, humans could communicate better and travel farther, effectively causing our world to “shrink.” Soon, Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy mused in 1929, the world would get so small that every person on average would be approximately six steps from every other person on Earth.
Have we made it there yet?
Mathematicians, sociologists, and physicists have long struggled over that question, and now Yahoo and Facebook have joined together to find out. They are testing the “six degrees of separation” theory by asking Facebook’s 750 million users, each of whom have an average of 130 friends, to select one Facebook friend to be the “target person.” A message will then be sent from friend to friend — in what they hope is less than six friends — until they get to the target person.
They’re calling it the Small World Experiment and anyone with a Facebook account can participate.
The study’s findings will be published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal and research scientists are calling it “a milestone” because this research could not have been done even 15 years ago.
Learn more at the Washington Post.
