Tag: SIX-DEGREES

Ever wonder how many clicks it takes to get from the Wikipedia page for Bill Gates to the page for Mark Shuttleworth? The answer is three. How about from "ice cream" to "cone?" Surprisingly, the answer is four. We know this not because we've been wasting hours clicking on every possible Wikipedia link and tabulating the results, but because somebody's done all the hard work for us by creating a ...

Will Smith and Kevin Bacon may both know that there's no more than six degrees of separation between everyone on the planet. But the folks at Microsoft's research division now have quantifiable proof. Well, sort of. Microsoft Research did a bit of analysis with raw MSN messenger data. Without actually reading any private messages, (the data all remained anonymous) the team tracked the trajectory ...