Computer scientists at a US university have devised an
experiment to test the effectiveness of social
networks.
Interest in social networking has grown since 1969 when
psychologists produced the “six degrees of separation” theory – the
idea that everyone in the world is linked, with only six
connections separating any two people. The internet – with social
networking sites such as MySpace and the growing community of
bloggers – has stoked interest in how these networks function.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of
Engineering and Applied Science tested a number of social network
theories by asking a group of students to play a colour picking
game on networked computers. Each student had to pick a colour
that was different to that chosen by anyone who was immediately
connected to him or her in the network.
The scientists changed the connection in the network to match
different theoretical models and varied the amount of information
the students had about which colours were being chosen by their
colleagues to test different types of social network.
The research, published in the Science journal, found that some
of the simplest social networks were the least effective and that
seeing beyond a local view of the network could hinder the
functioning of more complicated social networks.
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