Fail Fast: Six Degrees of Separation 2.0

May 25, 2011 7 Comments

About three months ago, I embarked on a less-than-epic, although very entertaining, quest to confirm or deny the famous Six Degrees of Separation experiment, originally conducted by Stanley Milgrim.  My goal was to send out letters, as in the original experiment, and have those recipients do their best to get those letters to a named someone in Boston.  Each link in the chain would write down their name on the letter, and, by the end, we’d have a list of how many people the letter went through to get to that final person.

Well, it’s time to report out on that experiment.  Get ready to have your mind blown.

Not one letter made it to my contact in Boston.

Possible reasons:

  1. The letters got raptured on Saturday.
  2. The letters were digitized and stored in Amazon’s cloud, next to Lady Gaga’s music.
  3. People don’t send letters anymore.
My subjects – the initial recipients of the letter – primarily consisted of young Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.  Despite including about $4 of stamps in each envelope, I’m guessing that most of the initial recipients didn’t actually send their original letter.  Snail mail is inefficient, and, outside of the Google mailboxes, I’m not even sure where I would go to find our local post office.
So, let’s look at the next iteration of social connection: the internet.  We’ll turn to Wikipedia for a rundown of experiments that have been done to test for these sorts of connections on computers.

In 2001, Duncan Watts, a professor at Columbia University, attempted to recreate Milgram’s experiment on the internet, using an e-mail message as the “package” that needed to be delivered, with 48,000 senders and 19 targets (in 157 countries). Watts found that the average (though not maximum) number of intermediaries was around six.

A 2007 study by Jure Leskovec and Eric Horvitz examined a data set of instant messages composed of 30 billion conversations among 240 million people. They found the average path length among Microsoft Messenger users to be 6.6 (some now call the theory, “the seven degrees of separation” because of this.).

It has been suggested by some commentators that interlocking networks of computer mediated lateral communication could diffuse single messages to all interested users worldwide as per the 6 degrees of separation principle via Information Routing Groups, which are networks specifically designed to exploit this principle and lateral diffusion.

Right now, due to the mass amount of social data on the site, Facebook is probably our best bet for measuring something like this.  However, that would probably be an invasion of privacy.  Also, don’t join any groups that claim to be a “Six Degrees of Separation” project.  None of them have any way of measuring that, and are probably just initiatives to create ever-larger groups on Facebook.
Twitter might be another outlet for measuring degrees of separation.  However, I follow people like Conan O’Brien on Twitter, and I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t count as a connection.  Alternatively, perhaps it does, and we need to redefine what constitutes a degree of separation in the digital world.
All in all, while this experiment was ultimately a failure, I think it tentatively confirms the hypothesis that the younger generations don’t send snail mail much.  But that’s not something the US Postal Service couldn’t have told us.

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Game Theory: How to Predict the Future of the American Budget

April 7, 2011 Leave a comment

Politicians are locked in an epic battle of economic ideas.  If they can’t come to a consensus on the fiscal budget, the government faces a shutdown of indeterminate length.

These budget negotiations are not a game. Or are they? Regardless, game theorists will attempt to analyze them.

On NPR‘s All Things Considered, Ari Shapiro took a look at the recent budget negotiations from a game theoretical perspective.  How well did he do?  Let’s take a look.

There are a lot of problems with applying game theory to a situation like the budget negotiations.  The first, and most obvious, is that game theory is predominantly a theoretical area of study.  Game theorists make a lot of assumptions and simplifications.  These shortcuts make most games more interesting to consider as thought experiments rather than actual, predictive models.

One such assumption is that all players are rational.  As we’ve discussed on Game Theory Ninja previously, this assumption needs some serious work. Shapiro doesn’t talk about this, and instead kicks the story off with a statement about politicians: “To a game theorist, each one of these people is a rational, logical, actor.”  To a game theorist, yes.  But you’d be hard-pressed to find someone on the street who agrees with this.

Games, in game theory, are generally played within a set of defined rules.  These rules help determine player strategy. Shapiro says some of the rules of the budget game might include:

  1. Do what’s right for the country.
  2. Get reelected.
  3. Serve your constituents.

However, in the budget game, rules might be different for every player, and the players might not even be sure about what their own rules are.

Another determinant of player strategy is payoff – what’s the expected reward for given actions?  In this situation, a politician might expect to get reelected if he does a good job.  However, we don’t really know what the motivations of politicians are – are they working towards reelection, or a different reward?

Games fall into a variety of categories.  Many games that we’re familiar with, like TicTacToe, have a clear winner and a clear loser.  Games like this are called “Zero Sum.”  Other games, like Prisoner’s Dilemma, require the players to cooperate.  The budget negotiations require cooperation, but, even in the event of cooperation, the payoffs to the players are unclear.

Nevertheless, Shapiro says that a complicated game like this follows “a logical, analyzable path.”  What is it?  Shapiro never lets us in on this secret.

Part of the problem with applying game theory to complex, real-life situations like this is that game theory, because of it’s severe lack of predictive power, doesn’t let us see more than a day or two down the line.

So, is game theory useful when applied to a situation like this?  Like most applications of game theory, it’s interesting as a thought experiment.  However, the predictive power of such an application is clearly lacking.

Listen to the full report here.

Filed under news, Opinion, review, World Future Society Tagged with , , ,

Six Degrees of Separation 2.0

February 23, 2011 9 Comments

Most people have heard of “Six Degrees of Separation” – the concept that any two people are only separated by a maximum of six connections.  That is to say, a chain of “a friend of a friend” statements can beg made to connect any two people in six steps or fewer.  Games like the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon – based on the assumption that any individual can be linked through film roles to actor Kevin Bacon in six steps – are modeled after this idea.

The concept is backed up by science, too.  One such example of scientific backing is the study done by American psychologist Stanley Milgram.  It’s described here, by Malcolm Gladwell:

In the late nineteen-sixties, a Harvard social psychologist named Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment in an effort to find an answer to what is known as the small-world problem: How are human beings connected? Do we belong to separate worlds, operating simultaneously but autonomously, so that the links between any two people, anywhere in the world, are few and distant? Or are we all bound up together in a grand, interlocking web?

Milgram’s idea was to test this question with a chain letter. For one experiment, he got the names of a hundred and sixty people, at random, who lived in Omaha, Nebraska, and he mailed each of them a packet. In the packet was the name and address of a stockbroker who worked in Boston and lived in Sharon, Massachusetts. Each person was instructed to write his name on a roster in the packet and send it on to a friend or acquaintance who he thought would get it closer to the stockbroker.

The idea was that when the letters finally arrived at the stockbroker’s house Milgram could look at the roster of names and establish how closely connected someone chosen at random from one part of the country was to another person chosen at random in another part. Milgram found that most of the letters reached the stockbroker in five or six steps. It is from this experiment that we got the concept of six degrees of separation.

You might have landed on this page because you received a similar letter.  I’m conducting an informal follow-up study, mainly out of curiosity, to see if this theory still holds.  Throughout the week of February 21st, I’ll be disseminating letters to people in my corner of the world – Mountain View, California – and having letter recipients try to contact someone in Boston.

This someone is a friend of a friend of mine, so I realize this doesn’t make the study completely legitimate.  But, to the best of my knowledge, none of the people to whom I’m giving a letter will know this person.

Using resources like Google, Facebook, or the Internet aren’t allowed, but I’m guessing letter recipients will use them anyway.

I’m mainly curious to see if this “six degrees” has shrunk at all since 1967, since Milgram completed his study.  I’m also curious to see how many of these actually get to the final recipient, since nobody uses snail mail anymore.  Six Degrees 3.0 will be the social media component, and should show up on the blog in a couple of months.

Want to participate?  Leave a comment and I’ll send you a letter!

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Why You Should Play Games At Work

January 24, 2011 5 Comments

What is a game?  On any given day, we might play video games, card games, computer games, board games, sports, or games on cell phones. So what do all of these have in common?

Jane McGonigal defines games as “unnecessary obstacles that we volunteer to tackle.” Games have goals, are governed by rules, and give us feedback.  Additionally, they’re activities in which we participate voluntarily.

Jane McGonigal is a gaming expert.  She’s spoken at TED, created her own games, and written a book about – of course – gaming.  Tonight, at Santa Clara University, she gave a talk about the current state of games, the psychology behind games, and what makes games so compelling.

Many gamers will tell you that they play games to relax.  However, it turns out that’s not usually the case. McGonigal, during her talk, said that games actually put us under a lot of stress.   Neurologically and physically, playing games isn’t actually at all relaxing.  Gamers are hard at work completing quests, saving the world, or even saving lives.

If games are so difficult and so stressful, why do we keep playing them?  It turns out that games don’t cause stress – they cause eustress, or positive stress.  By playing our game of choice, we’ve chosen to activate the stress.  We see it as positive, engaging, and motivating.

McGonigal listed four aspects of gaming that, essentially, make us want to game.  Coincidentally, she says, they’re also the four components of fulfilling lives.

  1. Satisfying Work.  Gamers sit down and attack a project, get positive feedback, and feel like they’ve accomplished something.
  2. Urgent Optimism.  In games, something important needs to be done, and the gamer is person who needs to get it done.
  3. Social Connectivity.  When we play a game with someone, we like them better.
  4. Heroic Purpose.  Also called “epic meaning.”  Gamers are given an important, meaningful task that they need to accomplish.

McGonigal recently wrote a book: Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change The World.  The book covers, in more depth, the benefits of gameplay, and how gamers might funnel their energy towards fixing some of the big problems of the world.

Almost a year ago, I wrote about Jane McGonigal and the trend of gamification.  Gamification is turning almost any aspect of real life into a game, or, at least, into something resembling one.  Jesse Schell says video games, from Xbox achievements to DARPA’s Red Balloon Challenge to the points-based WeightWatchers program are already invading real life.  Economists are using video game data from games like EVE to uncover fundamental truths about decision-making.  Foldit – a protein folding game – crowdsources high-level organic chemistry to try to cure diseases.  Nike + is a device that allows players to use technology to compete against each other in individual sports.

McGonigal wants to make it very clear that she’s not necessarily advocating turning everything into a game.  However, she does endorse the positive spirit that comes with gaming.  She’s advocating making tasks more “gameful” in a way that might encourage that positive spirit.

McGonigal creates a compelling case in favor of playing games.  If she doesn’t convince you, maybe this statistic will: 70% of CEOs, arguably some of the most successful people, admit to playing games while at work.

This event was organized by The Commonwealth Club.  McGonigal’s website is here.

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Carrying Books is Ridiculously Primitive

January 22, 2011 10 Comments

Unfortunately, although I was registered, I was unable to attend Consumer Electronics Show this year.  However, the Mayor of San Clemente – also an English teacher – did attend. She wrote an exclusive guest post for Game Theory Ninja.

Full disclosure – the mayor of San Clemente may or may not be my mother, and I may or may not have encouraged her to attend.  Here’s what she had to say about the event.

—

“Carrying books is ridiculously primitive” –Walter Mossberg, 2011 CES

Xerox corporation contributed close to a half billion dollars to U.S. education in the past decade. Was it worth it? According to Chairman and CEO Ursula Burns, the return on investment isn’t clear. If that investment were held to the standards of other Xerox investments, it would not make the cut for future funding.

The message from CES 2011: U.S. education is caught in a growing squeeze play. On one side, U.S. business is moving on all fronts to lead global innovation. On the other side, most of that technology doesn’t make it to the classroom, and many of the students who will contribute to the U.S. economy might not even be growing up in the United States. Read more of this post

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