Systems and methods for managing and evaluating a social network. The social network is represented as a graph structure and stored in distributed memory. A viable path from one node that is not directly connected to another node in the graph structure may be determined by traversing the graph in stages, moving outward from each node in stages until common midpoint nodes are found providing a connection between the nodes. When midpoint nodes are found, the paths connecting the one node to the other node may be reconstructed.