Vkontakte supports the theory of six handshakes Bashny.Net

We decided to test the theory of six degrees of separation in the social network Vkontakte. We remind you that according to this theory, all the inhabitants of the Earth know each other through a chain of five (i.e. six degrees of separation). Wikipedia, of course, will tell you about this theory much more, and here published the results of testing this theory on contact lists of MSN messenger (they got the 6.6 degrees of separation, that is sufficiently close to that).





During the research, the user base of Vkontakte, the author of the experience I came across one strange feature: close to 50 percent of all users with a non-zero number of friends included in a completely independent clusters in which no external. So, if we take 40, then they added in friends only each other and all. Our researcher believes that it is likely robots.

Naturally, this group of people were screened from the database for the experiment. Moreover, analyzing only pairs of friends, not subscribers users. The results were analyzed 6763 pair of users and got the result, which can be seen in the histogram:





X — axis length, respectively, the shortest chain of friends, and on the y — axis the probability to find it in percent.

The results of the experiment got the same result between two random users Vkontakte has an average of 5.65 friends. The result, frankly, is really close to the experimental Microsoft.



Source: /users/413