Well I was watching a program on Belgium television today about networks. It was very interesting and was explaining how within networks (no matter what kind) everything is connected to everything else in on average 6 steps. So for instance I would be connected on Facebook to Angelina Jolie in about 6 steps, so I have a friend, who has a friend, who has a friend, who has a friend, who has a friend that know Angelina. The strange thing about this is that this is also true IRL, for the internet, for power grids but also for diseases. Diseases are linked to each other by defective genes they share. The idea is that in many cases there are just a few connections, but in a few cases there ate a huge number of connections (HUB) to one person or gen. The ultimate goal for one of the researchers was to find common genes and eliminate or repair them to battle diseases. But this goes for the power grids as well, take out one of the HUB's and we are in trouble. Anyway, if this is true for stuff like this, this should also be true for Entropia. So if any of you need to contact anyone in game, it should take 6 or less steps between people and people on their friend list to get to that person. This is a nice visual way to see the connections you have in Facebook. You need to let it connect with your Facebook page one time so it can get your friends. It does not show up anywhere on your page, it just gets your list of friends. http://danielmclaren.com/2008/01/facebook-mutual-friend-network-visualization-in-flash#_
This may have been based on the game of 6 steps to Kevin Bacon (or insert your favorite/most hated celebrity here). In Entropia it would probably be 2 or 3 max, except for an unallied new player who has never traded, or taken a ride in a vehicle.
The funny thing is that the people doing the research about this had not heard of the 6 steps to Kevin Bacon game when they started, just during the work they ran into it. They then asked for the info (network) of the game and found out that this indeed is the same principal as the work they were doing. A lot of 'small' actors connected to just a few people and a few 'big' actors that were connected to a huge amount of people, the 'big' actors being the HUB's in this case.
