Six Degrees of Innovation

Let?s start with that mysterious Q. It?s made up of two parts. The first is the average number of connections you need to join two random people in a network. That number can be surprisingly small, even in a very big network; for example, you can connect two random Facebook users, on average, with a chain that?s less than five friends long. The second part of Q measures the extent to which two people who are connected to the same person are likely to be connected to each other: the ?clusteredness? of the network. You might imagine that a highly clustered network, where people glom together into small, interwoven groups, would require long chains of connections to get from one incestuous clique to another. But applied mathematicians in the 1990s, most notably Duncan Watts and Steven Strogatz, found that many real-world networks don?t obey that intuitive relation. In real networks ranging from Facebook friendships down to neurons in the hippocampus, small-scale groups are indeed tightly clustered, but the presence of rare but crucial connections between distant clusters means you can hop from any person to any other in surprisingly few steps. Networks with this property are called ?small worlds,? and it?s the small worlds that have high values of Q. A network with connections chosen randomly and with no interesting structure, on the other hand, will have a low Q.

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=6aa4878f708bb7802409f4b84c646ad6

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