Tag: Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon
Google’s Bacon Number
The engineers in Mountain View, California have been spending their time trying to figure out how many degrees of separation there are between Kevin Bacon and every other actor, living or dead.
Effective immediately, if you perform a Google search for an actor’s name followed by the words “bacon number,” the first thing you’ll see is a bold declaration of how many degrees of separation there are between that actor and the seemingly omnipresent Mr. Bacon. Below that is a breakdown explsining how that number was calculated.
It turns into a surprisingly addicting game to try to find anyone at all who has a higher number than two. It seems nearly impossible to locate an actor who stretches to the full six degrees of separation.
Even such obscurities like Snooki from Jersey Shore are connected to Kevin Bacon through just one other actor. Even if you go back to people who died decades ago, the same thing applies. For example, Desi Arnaz of I Love Lucy fame was in the movie The Escape Artist. So was Joan Hackett. Hackett and Bacon were both in Only When I Laugh.
Orson Welles, Betty White, RuPaul, Elmo…they all have Bacon Numbers of 2.
It takes someone like William Rufus Shafter, whose entire filmography includes two short features from 1898 to attain a higher number than six. Google isn’t the only one to toy with this concept. In 2008, Microsoft analyzed instant message data and found most people are separated by no more than seven degrees.