4.74 Degrees of Separation on Facebook

First time accepted submitter perryizgr8 writes "Facebook Data Team has taken all the friends data of everyone on Facebook and analyzed it, finding out the shortest distance between every two persons. They can now confidently say that the average degree of separation between any two humans is 4.74, not six as previously claimed by various entities."

3.74 I think you will find

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15844230

Re:no it's not

[Zamphatta]

Where are all the mods? Somebody needs to up this guy's score 'cause it's statistically insightful. After all, if it's 4.75 between Facebook friends, then to connect someone without a Facebook account, one would have to add another 1 to it. Which totally blows away the argument.

Re:Disagree

[DavidTC]

0 is the degree of separation with yourself.

Kevin Bacon is the only actor with a Bacon number of 0.

Re:Skewed Data?

[Sique]

Moreso, the average chain length has nothing to do with the original 6-degrees-of-separation claim.

The original statement was that there aren't two people on Earth for which the shortest chain of people which connects both is longer than 5 other persons. You could construct a situation where the average degree of separation is slightly above 1, and still have at least two people with a longer chain than 10 other persons. Lets say you have 990 people who know each other, making the average degree of separation of this group exactly 1, and 10 people where one only knows a single person, this one knows the first one and then another one, and the tenth knows the ninth and one of the 990 others.

Then you would get an average degree of separation of about 1.035 and still the longest chain is 11.

Re:Cool

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Facebook ironically.

No, in Soviet Russia you use Facebook. Elsewhere ...