Google builds Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon into its search system | Movies
Movies This article is more than 11 years oldGoogle builds Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon into its search system
This article is more than 11 years oldStudent game, based on the idea that it is always possible to connect every film actor in the world back to the Footloose star, has been added into Google's search engineIt is the party game beloved of cinephiles everywhere, one which rewards detailed knowledge of the career of one of the finest actors never to receive an Oscar nomination. And now it is even easier to play: Google has built Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon into its search system.
Devised in January 1994 by a trio of students at Pennsylvania's Albright college, the original game was based on the idea that it is always possible to connect every movie actor in the world back to the Footloose star in no more than six associations. A website, board game and book later emerged and an initially reluctant Bacon eventually embraced the phenomenon by launching his own site, SixDegrees.org, to foster charitable donations.
To use Google's system, the user simply types in the words "Bacon number" followed by the name of the actor. By way of example, typing "Bacon number Simon Pegg" reveals that Bacon and the British actor are linked by Tom Cruise, because the latter appeared in 1992's A Few Good Men with Bacon and in 2006's Mission: Impossible III with Pegg. Pegg therefore has a Bacon number of two, indicating two degrees of separation.
Lead engineer Yossi Matias said the project was about showcasing the power of Google's search engine by flagging up the deep-rooted connections between people in the film industry. "If you think about search in the traditional sense, for years it has been to try and match, find pages and sources where you would find the text," he told the Hollywood Reporter. "It's interesting that this small-world phenomena when applied to the world of actors actually shows that in most cases, most actors aren't that far apart from each other. And most of them have a relatively small Bacon number."
By way of example, type French Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard's name into the system and it is revealed that she has a Bacon number of two, while Humphrey Bogart, who died in 1957, nevertheless has a Bacon number of just three.
What Bacon himself thinks of the new system is as yet unclear. During an interview with the Guardian's Xan Brooks in 2005 the actor said he was initially uncomfortable with Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon but finally came to see it positively.
"I thought, 'Well, of course it's an insult'," he said. "I thought they must be insulting me: 'Oh look, he's such a loser. How hilarious that we can connect this loser to Marlon Brando or Laurence Olivier.'
"But then I met the guys and they were, like, really excited to meet me, which surprised me. And then they were working out a way that they could make some money out of the thing. So they asked me to write the intro to their book, which I did, and they put out the board game. Whereas of course you don't really need a book or a board game to play the game. It's just a concept. That's what's cool to me."
If you have your own connection to Kevin Bacon, feel free to add it in the comments below.
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