Saturday, August 09, 2003
Virtual Bacon?
The BBC reports the results of a study that claims that an e-mail needs to be forwarded a mere five to seven times to reach almost any other e-mail user, pretty much replicating in the virtual world what unemployed students managed to prove a long time ago with Kevin Bacon.
The small world idea has now gained support from the work of a research team headed by Peter Dodds and colleagues from the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy at the Columbia University in New York, US. In their experiment, the scientists recruited 61,168 individuals and asked them to try to relay messages to one of 18 target people in 13 countries.
PS: The University of Virginia CS department has an Oracle of Bacon website where you can waste plenty of time.
The small world idea has now gained support from the work of a research team headed by Peter Dodds and colleagues from the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy at the Columbia University in New York, US. In their experiment, the scientists recruited 61,168 individuals and asked them to try to relay messages to one of 18 target people in 13 countries.
PS: The University of Virginia CS department has an Oracle of Bacon website where you can waste plenty of time.
