Small-world experiment

The small-world experiment was designed to show the incredible connectedness of the world we live in. It works like this: You take a group of people and give each person a sheet of paper. On it, they have to write down their name and draw six lines to represent their friends. Then, you have each person send their sheet of paper to one of the people they connected to on their sheet. That person has to do the same, so on and so forth. In the end, you'll have a chain of people connected to each other, starting from the first person. Amazingly, when the experiment is finished, almost everyone is connected to everyone else through only a few steps – that's the 'small world' phenomenon!