Two researchers have determined that the "six degrees of separation" theory holds up, give or take.

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"Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" game links the actor to any other actor via six connections.

The theory that spawned the "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" game holds that any two people are linked to one another by a chain of six people. The Kevin Bacon game links the actor to any other actor via six connections. A 1990 play entitled "Six Degrees of Separation," which was adapted for the screen in 1993 and starred Will Smith, is said to have popularized the term.

Researchers Eric Horvitz and Jure Leskovec looked at communication on the Microsoft Messenger instant-messaging network for the month of June, 2006.

From their study of 30 billion conversations among 240 million people, they found that the average path length among Messenger users is 6.6.

"So, we might say that, via the lens provided on the world by Messenger, we find that there are about 'seven degrees of separation' among people," the researchers wrote.

The theory stems from research done in the U.S. by Stanley Milgram in 1969 called the "the small world experiment." Milgram took a sample of 64 people and found that the average number of jumps for a letter to travel from Omaha, Nebraska and Wichita, Kansas to a target recipient in Boston was 6.2, thus the "six degrees of separation," though Milgram never used the term.

Using data from Microsoft Messenger, Horvitz and Leskovec were able to conduct the experiment on a massive scale.

"We used a population sample that is more than 2 million times larger than the group studied earlier," the researchers said.

Using the Microsoft Messenger data, the researchers also found that people tend to communicate more with each other when they have similar age, language, and location, and that cross-gender conversations are both more frequent and of longer duration than conversations with the same gender.