corvi42's Journal: 6 Degrees of seperation

Just exploring this new Friend / Foe thing for the first time. What occurs to me is this - we've got friends & foes, friends of friends & foes of foes. Build a graph of these relations and one might be able to map out evidence for the 6 degrees of seperation hypothesis. Kind of a sociological parallel computing project.

So the moral issues that immediately arise: are my enemy's enemies my friends?

friends of friends... ?

[ibennetch]

Or conversely, are the friends of my friends also my friends?

Re:friends of friends... ?

[corvi42]

Or are the friends of your friends your fans or your foes, or are you their fans or foes.

They've made the dynamic interesting by making the relationships unidirectional - so with lots of combinations of fans, foes, freaks and friends - think how many different possibilities that makes:

4 = 4^1 for the first degree of seperation,
16 = 4^2 for the second degree of seperation,
64 = 4^3 for the third,
and so on growing exponentially at 4^n for the nth degree of seperation.
The sixth degree of seperation would have 4096 different possible relationships.

It would make for some interesting analysis to see what types of relationships and relationship networks occur. If you could also watch them develop over time you might be able to infer some rules of play as to human socialization - how quickly do fan/friend connections become closed networks of mutually supportive friend-friend relations, or do they at all?