Analysis of six degrees of separation in Facebook using Ant colony optimization

Abstract

Six degrees of separation is a popular theory that is widely accepted by many people, which states any two people on this world can be connected through an average number of six steps. Though there is no solid scientific evidence that the six degrees of separation theory is true, it remains as an area of interest to social researches. With the advent of digital mapping, the theory can now be tested with social networks, but will the theory of six degrees of separation hold for the virtual world? The link between any two people in a graph with number of hops needs to be identified and that can be done efficiently with the help of Ant colony optimization technique (ACO). As ACO algorithms are proved to be efficient with a broad range of NP hard problems such as the traveling salesman problem (TSP) or the quadratic assignment problem (QAP), and is increasingly gaining interest for solving real life engineering and scientific problems, an attempt has been made in this paper to analyze the six degrees of separation in the popular social network Facebook which has over 1.3 billion active users as of June 2014.