Six degrees of separation

It has been said before that you will "know" evreyone in the world by a link of (at most) six other people.

So, for example, I may "know" Athousandyound, because my brother went to school with a boy whose father was the principal of the school that John Major's nephew went to - and said nephew lives next door to ATY.

Now, while this has been "proved" may times, I do not believe it (however, I do not dispute it either)

Now, why is it in this forum?

I want to "play" it here, but do not know
1) how to begin
2) how to maintain anonymity (for all I know, ATY may be my boss here in South Africa!!!)


Any ideas?

Hi Alcra. What you been up to all these years?

Originally posted by Alcra
It has been said before that you will "know" evreyone in the world by a link of (at most) six other people.

So, for example, I may "know" Athousandyound, because my brother went to school with a boy whose father was the principal of the school that John Major's nephew went to - and said nephew lives next door to ATY.

Now, while this has been "prove ...[text shortened]... maintain anonymity (for all I know, ATY may be my boss here in South Africa!!!)


Any ideas?

Curses! Discovered at last!

Originally posted by Alcra
It has been said before that you will "know" evreyone in the world by a link of (at most) six other people.

So, for example, I may "know" Athousandyound, because my brother went to school with a boy whose father was the principal of the school that John Major's nephew went to - and said nephew lives next door to ATY.

Now, while this has been "prove ...[text shortened]... maintain anonymity (for all I know, ATY may be my boss here in South Africa!!!)


Any ideas?

Does the 'message opponent' feature allow anonymity? If so, you play it like this: send a message to everyone you know on RHP, like this:

'Please add your alias to the end of this message and send it on to everyone you know at RHP.

Alcra'

If enough people play along, after a while you'll get messages back like this:

'Please add your alias to the end of this message and send it on to everyone you know at RHP.

Alcra
Alcra's friend
Alcra's friend's friend
...
AThousandYoung
...
Alcra's friend's friend
Alcra's friend'

Now you know not only that you are linked to lots of people, but you have an upper bound on how distantly you are linked. Two snags: 1) you require a reasonable proportion of the whole RHP community to participate (the exact proportion will depend on how many people each person on RHP knows), 2) if they do this will generate a LOT of traffic, and you may become infamous and/or get banned by Russ.

There is a less disruptive way of getting your result for a particular person, but the links in the chain need to think: basically you send the same message, except people are asked to send on the message 'to everyone on RHP whom you know and you suspect might know AThousandYoung better than you do'. Amazingly, this can actually work, as people will often pick up some knowledge as to how well distant acquaintances know each other, and failing that people can make educated guesses based on eg which country someone lives in or their line of work.