Stimulated by Pool and Kochens work, the great social psychologist Stanley Milgram devised an ingenious experiment in the late 1960s to test the hypothesis. Kochen and Pool realized this, but were unable to solve the more difficult problem. People, however, do not choose friends at random, which implies that the real answer should be higher.
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Assuming that individuals choose 1,000 friends at random from a population as large as 100 million, Kochen and Pool showed that no more than two or three intermediaries (hence three or four degrees of separation) would be required to connect any two people. The first scientific exploration of what was to become known as the "small-world problem" came almost three decades later in the work of Manfred Kochen (a mathematician) and Ithiel de Sola Pool (a political scientist), who proposed a mathematical explanation of the problem. Because the last person in the chain, who we call the target, does not count as an intermediary, five intermediaries is equivalent to six degrees of separation. As early as 1929, the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy speculated that anyone in the world could be connected to anyone else through a chain consisting of no more than five intermediaries. This is a question with rather a long history.
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Watts, an associate professor of sociology at Columbia University and author of the forthcoming book Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (Norton, 2003), is the principal investigator of the ongoing Small World Research Project.