Thread: Six degrees of separation

Its just a simple case of probabillity and abit of chaos theory. Isn't it obvious. Saying that it breaks down where a country is really isolated or if you take into account stuff like tribes that don't come into contact with the rest of the world.

It can only be an educated guess. Or a well thought out algorithm?

I'm pretty sure a computer scientist knows more about this then a layman. Basically, it too do with the fact that there is a exponential growth, that easily reaches the number of people alive today.

Like I said if we are talking algorithm in terms of using an aquaintence as an analogy. Friggen fascinating. The numbers would be endless regardless if you didn't reach your test subject.

This is really basic stuff, guys. Entirely intuitive. It's just another kind of fractal. Whenever you need to navigate through a complicated network, it's always a good bet to get to the highest point of heirarchy, and then work back down.

A good example of this is the wikipedia game where you try to link a random wiki to Hitler with only blue links on the pages, using the fewest jumps possible. Now, if you were stupid and tried clicking random links until you got to Hitler, then it would take many links. But obviously no one does that. You know what to do, even if you've never thought about it. You go up to country level, go to Germany, and then Hitler will be on that page somewhere. There are also rare cases when going through "war" is faster. But those two paths account for well over 90% of ALL paths to Hitler.

Another example is road navigation. If you want to cross the country, you know that you have to try to get to the most major highway possible as soon as possible to minimize travel time (up to traffic) and navigation concerns.

This is so intuitively obvious that I don't understand how people can doubt/not understand it.

It's not universally true though, obviously, considering there are some communities who have no contact with the outside world.

Originally Posted by Xei

It's not universally true though, obviously, considering there are some communities who have no contact with the outside world.

That's like saying you can't follow hypertext links to an isolated computer, and then saying that disproves the theory behind network pathing...

Obviously, the underlying assumption is that the fractal is relatively dense, so that there exists at least one path between any two points in the space. If that wasn't the case, then there's no discussion to be had at all. Like, I know I can't do calculus on oranges. That's why I stick to functions.

I don't personally see how fractals are relevant...

But yes, clearly if your conjecture is that each node can be reached via only six edges then an isolated node disproves that conjecture.

Originally Posted by Xei

I don't personally see how fractals are relevant...

But yes, clearly if your conjecture is that each node can be reached via only six edges then an isolated node disproves that conjecture.

No, you're missing the point. I'm saying that given connectedness, there's an optimal strategy for finding the shortest path that doesn't require global knowledge.