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Well almost. Microsoft IM Windows Live messenger formerly MSN messenger proves the theory “six degrees of separation” proposed by Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinth in 1929, but the actual number is 6.6.

At this point you must be wondering as to what exactly is six degrees of separation. Well it goes like this “all the people on this planet are connected to each other through a chain of acquaintances that has no more than five intermediaries”.

In other words:

If a person is one step away from each person they know and two steps away from each person who is known by one of the people they know, then everyone is an average of six “steps” away from each person on Earth.

So a team of researchers from Microsoft went on to prove this theory by analyzing instant messaing system. They analyzed 30 billion messages sent on the company’s instant messenger client to see if the theory is really true. To their surprise it is actually very very close to being true.

According to Eric Horvitz, one of the researcher:

To me, it was pretty shocking. What we’re seeing suggests there may be a social connectivity constant for humanity. People have had this suspicion that we are really close. But we are showing on a very large scale that this idea goes beyond folklore.

Jure Leskovec, another member of the team said they took an IM message between two unnamed individuals as a link and then examined how to connect 180 billion different pairs of users in the database. It was revealed that the actual number of links was 6.6, although 78 per cent of the world’s population can be linked in seven steps or less.

Although in some cases it took 20 links to find a connection.

This is not the first time someone has tried to prove this theory.

In 1967, American sociologist Stanley Milgram randomly selected a group of people in the mid-West to send packages to a stranger located in Massachusetts. The senders knew the recipient’s name, occupation, and general location. They were instructed to send the package to a person they knew on a first-name basis who they thought was most likely, out of all their friends, to know the target personally. That person would do the same, and so on, until the package was personally delivered to its target recipient. it only took (on average) between five and seven intermediaries to get each package delivered.

In more recent times a professor at Columbia University, Duncan Watts experimented by using an e-mail message as the “package” that needed to be delivered, and surprisingly, after reviewing the data collected by 48,000 senders and 19 targets (in 157 countries), the average number of intermediaries was indeed, six. This happened in 2001.