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This is a totally open society where friends can appear at random. Now try the circle on the right, the "open world", where the connections are random and can leap across and around the circle without any limitation. Imagine how many steps it would take to be connected to everyone in the world. You will find that to travel around this small circle to the opposite side through the friends of friends of friends and so on, takes a surprisingly large number of steps. And each one of those friends has two friends to the left and two to the right. From the dot that represents you, you are linked to two friends to the left of you and two to the right. If you live in a "cliquey world", your situation is like that in the circle on the left where you are linked only to your near neighbours. The degree of cliquiness was studied in an article from Nature -Duncan Watts and Steven Strogatz (" Collective dynamics of 'small world' networks", vol 393. a low amount of ' cliquiness'), there are theories that show that this kind of assumption isn't necessarily true. While this theory assumes a fair amount of homogeneity in interpersonal relationships (i.e. However, as time progresses and the world becomes more globalized, this concept will become more and more accurate. This still isn't practically true given the emergence of new undiscovered tribes. So at the end, you have 100 trillion people! If one assumes the world population as of this noding is 5 billion people, then the number of people one knows is greater than the total number of people by a factor of 20,000 (2*10 4) making it highly likely that six degrees of separation are enough. (some people know many more, some people have no friends. Say the average person knows 100 other people. Just working out the numbers, this idea seems theoretically possible: