Networks in Hollywood: The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon
http://www-distance.syr.edu/bacon.html
The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon is a well-known trivia game that serves as an entertaining application of networks in the Hollywood scene. It all started in 1994 when Kevin Bacon made a rather brazen claim that he had worked with everybody in Hollywood, or someone who has worked with them. Of course, such an outspoken statement from a universally known actor such as Kevin Bacon rarely goes untested. Sure enough, three students from Albright College in Pennsylvania decided to call Bacon’s bet, and invented the game that we now know as the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.
In the game, each performer is assigned a “Bacon Number”, a positive integer that is indicative of his/her relation with Kevin Bacon. The higher one’s Bacon number, the farther he/she is relative to Bacon. In other words, we can look at each performer as a node, and an edge connects two performers if they’ve acted together in the same movie. An actor’s bacon’s number is the number of edges that are included in his/her shortest “path” to Bacon in the Hollywood network. Kevin Bacon himself has a Bacon number of 0.
The average Bacon number of all the actors in the IMDb database is slightly under 3, a rather remarkably small number. So it turns out that it may be an exaggeration to call Kevin Bacon the “center of the entertainment universe”, but not by much. Since the invention of this game in 1994, the concept has grown wildly popular, and has been referred to in a plethora of TV shows and commercials. Kevin Bacon himself has acknowledged and embraced the game, and has created a charitable organization called SixDegrees.org, as a tribute to this “small-world” phenomenon.