Mathematics of the Small-World Phenomenon (from Networks, Crowds, and Markets)

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/networks-book-ch20.pdf

by kakooljay • 17 years ago

3 2 17 years ago

cs.cornell.edu

kakooljay• 17 years ago

Includes a discussion of Stanley Milgram's famous experiment ["with a budget of only $680, he set out to test the speculative idea that people are really connected in the global friendship network by short chains of friends.. he asked a collection of 296 randomly chosen 'starters' to try forwarding a letter to a 'target' person, a stockbroker who lived in a suburb of Boston.." & found that the MEDIAN length of successful paths was just six] and clarifies a common misconception about it:

"It doesn’t establish a statement quite as bold as 'six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet' - the paths were just to a single, fairly affluent target; many letters never got there [all but 64 in fact]; and attempts to recreate the experiment have been problematic due to lack of participation."

yannis• 17 years ago

Full book (to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2010) at

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/

Mathematics of the Small-World Phenomenon (from Networks, Crowds, and Markets)

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