From Network Science by Albert-László Barabási The networks characterize everything from the Internet to academic citations, from Twitter to chemical reactions between the molecules in a cell. He called the links between the pages “the stitches that keep the fabric of our modern information society together.”Ī timeline of papers published on the small-world phenomenon in scale-free networks. “Any document is on average only 19 clicks away from any other,” he wrote in his remarkably accessible book Linked: The New Science of Networks. They found that the Web’s pages, despite the immense scope of cyberspace, exhibited a mere 19 degrees of separation. Such networks abound: They characterize everything from the Internet to co-authors of mathematics papers, from Twitter to chemical reactions between the molecules in a cell.īarabási and his colleagues discovered the rules governing scale-free networks while mapping the World Wide Web in 1999. The “system” Barabási refers to is any “scale free” network-that is, a network in which the “nodes,” or points of connection, are capable of linking to any number of other nodes. What matters is that the number is very small compared to the size of the system.” The precise number is a tossup, depending on how dense the network is. “But it doesn’t really matter-it could be four, five, six, or even 19. “Nobody ever thought that the number was accurate,” says Barabási, who heads Northeastern’s Center for Complex Network Research.
#Six degrees of separation analysis movie
Movie buffs revel in the concept-known in academic circles as the small-world phenomenon-with the trivia game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” wherein players aim to link any Hollywood actor to Bacon through six films or fewer.īut what if the number we’ve all been touting-that neat half-dozen-turned out to be wrong?Īccording to Albert-László Barabási, Robert Gray Dodge Professor of Network Science at Northeastern, it is and always has been, and no network scientists care. The theory holds that, on average, each of us is at most six connections away from anyone else in the world. John Guare coined the phrase with his eponymous 1990 play.
0 kommentar(er)
