Six Degrees

Here's a way to test the theory of Six Degrees of Separation in the Kevin Bacon Game The object of the game is to start with any actor or actress who has been in a movie and connect them to Kevin Bacon in the smallest number of links possible. Two people are linked if they've been in a movie together. For example, Alfred Hitchcock can be connected to Kevin Bacon by :

Alfred Hitchcock was in Show Business at War (1943) with Orson Welles, and Orson Welles was in A Safe Place (1971) with Jack Nicholson, and Jack Nicholson was in A Few Good Men (1992) with Kevin Bacon

Yahoo offer interesting info on the old 6 degrees. The theory that everyone in the world is separated by at most five acquaintances was first proposed in a 1929 short story by the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy in a story called "Chains".

In 1967, psychologist Stanley Milgram tested the theory by sending several letters to random people in the Midwest of USA. The letter featured the name, address, and occupation of a single person on the East Coastof USA and participants were asked to forward the letters to the people who they thought were most likely to know the person. It took an average of five intermediaries to reach the target.

The experiment came into some scrutiny afterwards, but the results were published in Psychology Today and gave birth to the phrase "six degrees of separation." John Guare popularized the term with his play, which later became a film starring Will Smith.

The original 1967 experiment was repeated in 2001 with email, with these
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