I have a friend named Sammy who back in the
early 2000s wrote some code for his MySpace page. And what the code did was anybody who visited
his page would have his picture and a tag line that said, “Sammy is my hero,” copied
over to their homepage. And that was a bit of fun for a while, but
Sammy wanted more. And so he tweaked his code so that no only
the picture and the tag line were copied over, but also the code itself. And now it exploded. In just nine hours he had reached 480 accounts. In 13 hours he was up to 8800. And in just over 18 hours he had hit a million
accounts, which was a full 1/35th of all the accounts on MySpace at the time. So in a panic, he tried to delete his page. And when he was successful he actually took
down the whole of MySpace with it. He was arrested and convicted of computer
hacking and ordered not to touch a computer for the next three years. But I think what this story really tells us
is just how connected we all are. Imagine you have 44 friends and each one of
those friends has 44 friends who are not also your friends. And each of them has an additional 44 friends,
each of whom has 44 friends who again has 44 friends and they have 44 more. Then in a chain of just six steps you would
be connected to 44 to the sixth or 7.26 billion people, more than are alive on earth today. And we have contemplated how closely connected
we area since long before MySpace even existed. Back in 1929 a Hungarian author and poet named
Frigyes Karinthy wrote a short story called Chains. And in it, one of the characters challengers
the others to find another person on earth that he cannot connect himself to through
fewer than five intermediaries. This is the origin of six degrees of separation. If the theory is correct, it means that you
would be connected to the Queen or Tom Cruise in just six steps. But they may be the easy ones. What about this shop owner or the Mongolian
sheep herder? What the theory really means is that any two
people picked at random from anywhere on the earth would be connected by just six steps. The idea remained just fiction until in the
1960s a Harvard psychologist, Stanley Milgram, attempted to test it. He called it the small world experiment after
that phenomenon where you are at a party, you meet a stranger and you find out that
you have a friend in common and you remark: Oh, it is such a small world. What he did was he sent out 300 packages to
people both in Boston and in Nebraska. Now what he wanted those people to do was
try to send their package to a target person in Boston, but they weren’t allowed to send
it directly to him. They had to send it to someone they knew on
a first name basis who they thought had a better chance of knowing the target and they
could forward it on in the same way. Now, as you might expect, most of the packages
never made it, but 64 did and the average pathway was 5.2. So now six degrees of separation had experimental
confirmation. Or did it? If you look more closely at Milgram’s sample,
you will find that of the 300 people, 100 were located in Boston, the actual city where
the target lived. Another 100 were stockbrokers, which was the
same profession as the target. So only 100 people lived in a different state
and had a different job. And of them only 18 of their packages made
it to the target. So we are talking about a sample size of 18
is all the evidence there was for six degrees of separation. So experimental evidence was tough to come
by. But a decade earlier, a mathematician named
Paul Erdos had tried to work out the theoretical properties of networks like these. But he didn’t have any information on the
structure of real social networks, so he decided to work on networks where the connections
between nodes were all completely random. And we can actually simulate a network like
this using buttons and thread where we just connect up the buttons at random. What Erdos found is that when the number of
links per node is small, the network is fragmented. Pick up any button and few others will come
with it. But once you exceed an average of one connection
per node, the behavior the network changes dramatically. They almost all link up forming a giant cluster. Now if you pick up any button almost all of
the rest will come with it. This change happens rapidly and it resembles
a phase transition in physics. Now you could call this a small world network,
since the path between any two buttons is short. The thing about random networks is that they
are naturally small world networks, because you are just as likely to be connected to
someone here in Manila as you are to someone in your own town. But obviously a random network doesn't represent
real life very well. So what do real world networks look like? Well, for that, we need to go to the empirical
data. In 1994 a couple of college kids invented
a game called six degrees of Kevin Bacon in which you try to connect any actor to Kevin
Bacon through just six steps through his costars. Now a couple of sociology researchers got
access to their database of a quarter million actors and they analyzed the network and what
they found was that it was a small world network, meaning between any two actors there were
only a very small number of steps. And that is very similar to a random network. But unlike a random network, the actor network
also showed a high degree of clustering, that is, they often worked together in small groups. So how do you get both this grouping behavior,
a high degree of clustering, and the short number of steps between any two actors? Well, to figure this out they looked at two
different extremes. Imagine a circle of nodes. Now if you connect them at random you get
the same outcome as Erdos, short paths between any two nodes, but little clustering. Now consider connecting up the nodes only
with their nearest two neighbors on each side. Now clustering is high, but path lengths are
long for two nodes picked at random. But what if you take this set up and rewire
just a small number of connections randomly. What you find is that the path length drops
rapidly, but clustering still remains high. So the key to modeling real social networks
is to have a lot of clustering behavior—that is, your friends are also friends with each
other—but also to have a few random acquaintances. And the importance of those acquaintances
can’t be overstated. There was a researcher named Granovetter in
the 1970s who published a paper called “The Strength of Weak Ties,” in which he points
out: You are much more likely to get a job through those random acquaintances than through
your close friends. And if you think about it, that makes sense,
because you and your close friends all know the same people and have the same information. It is through the random acquaintances that
you can get connections with people very far from your social circles. So you can find new jobs, new places to live
and you can be connected to the outside world. So, in fact, it is those random acquaintances
that make possible six degrees of separation. So when I want to... >> I am told the degrees have dropped in recent
years. >> Really >> ...to like four degrees. >> Tell me about that. How do we know this? >> I don’t know how they measure it, but
I have tested it and I think it actually has dropped based on how many people have friended
one another on Facebook. The friendship circle has grown, not that
they are bosom buddies, but they are people you have access to. That is the point. >> right. >> And it is... do you know this person who
then knows that so that I have access to these other people? So I am told that it has dropped. As much as the six degrees, we are down to
four, at most five. >> I think Neil DeGrasse Tyson might be right. In 2011 Facebook analyzed their data and they
found that 92 percent of their users were connected through just five steps. And that number is decreasing over time. The concept of six degrees of separation has
fascinated people for nearly a century. And I think that is not only because of how
counter intuitive it is, but also how comforting it is to know how closely we are all linked,
not in some kind of abstract, ill defined way, but through hard scientific data. Just six handshakes will connect you to anyone
else on the planet. Now I have a challenge for you. In the spirit of six degrees of separation
I want to try an experiment. I want you to try to get an email to me. But you can’t send it directly to me unless
you know me. So assuming you don’t, I want you to send
it to a friend of yours, someone you know on a first name basis who you think has a
better chance of getting that email to me. If your email eventually gets to me through
a chain of people, I will send you a postcard in the mail and I will tally up if we were
able to get that done in six links or not. So let’s try to do it and see if we can
connect. The instructions are in the description. This episode of Veritasium was inspired by
the Fine Brothers, Ben and Rafi Fine who are friends of mine. So we are connected through just one degree
of separation. Now they have a brand new TV series launching
on TruTV. It is called The Six Degrees of Everything
and it is a fast paced comedic show that tries to show us how six things that we don’t
think are connected actually are. It involves sketch comedy and songs and reality
TV. I am really looking forward to seeing how
they are going to do this. So you can check it out Tuesdays at 9:30 or
8:30 central on TruTv. I am so looking forward to it. And thank you to the Fine Brothers for sponsoring
this episode so I could check out the science of networks.
This was a really interesting video but I couldn't help but feel like some of the people in Manila weren't completely comfortable being in his video.
I realized /r/mealtimevideos are fans of Dyyrck from Vearlytaasiumm