Social Connection Games [Edit]

Six degrees of separation refers to the number of “steps” whereby everyone is “connected” to each person on Earth. This small world phenomenon is applied in the well known trivial game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” where the object of the game is to try and connect any actor to Kevin Bacon as quickly and in as few links as possible.

A student researcher, Stephen Dolan at Trinity College Dublin has now come up with software that can let users find out the number of clicks through Wikipedia which links two articles. For example, it takes three clicks to go from Trend to Hunting - through Market trends and Bear.

Interestingly, Dolan used his software to discover which Wikipedia article is the center where most articles go through. In the trivial game, Kevin Bacon is the predetermined hub. Well, the article closest to the centre of Wikipedia turns out to be “United Kingdom” and not Walmart where some claim to be the center of the Universe.