Blog: 'Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon' Game Provides Clue to Efficiency of Complex Networks

'Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon' Game Provides Clue to Efficiency of Complex Networks
University of California, San Diego (11/17/08) Froelich, Warren; Zverina, Jan

The small-world paradigm, discovered by sociologist Stanley Milgram in the 1960s and popularized by the "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" game, has become a source of inspiration for researchers studying the Internet as a global complex network. A study published in Nature Physics reveals a previously unknown mathematical model called "hidden metric space," which could explain the small-world phenomenon and its relationship to both man-made and natural networks such as human language, as well as gene regulation or neural networks that connect neurons to organs and muscles within our bodies. The concept of an underlying hidden space also may be of interest to researchers working to remove mounting bottlenecks within the Internet that threaten the smooth passage of digital information. "Internet experts are worried that the existing Internet routing architecture may not sustain even another decade," says Dmitri Krioukov, a researcher at the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA), based at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). CAIDA director and UCSD professor Kimberly Claffy says the discovery of a metric space hidden beneath the Internet could point toward architectural innovations that would remove this bottleneck, and Krioukov says the reconstruction of hidden metric spaces underlying a variety of real complex networks could have other practical applications. For example, hidden spaces in social or communications networks could lead to new, efficient strategies for searching for specific content or individuals.

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