Google ruins Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon

OrochiEddie

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Picked this up on the Consumerist today, but if you type in an actor (unsure of any other type of celebrity) and follow it with "Bacon Number" you get their degrees of separation. So for example I tried "Tom Cruise Bacon Number" and the first item on the search list is indeed his degree of separation (1).

http://consumerist.com/2012/09/goog...-degrees-of-kevin-bacon-with-new-feature.html
Google engineers are so good at their jobs, they apparently have plenty of time at work to tackle the really pressing problems facing the world today. For example — who wants to sit around and use their very own brains to try and figure out how far apart any given actor is from Kevin Bacon?

A quick lesson for those who aren't familiar with the game: Someone names an actor or actress and participants then try to name movies they've been in, linked by actors in those films and try to get back to someonewho's been in a movie with Kevin Bacon in the shortest amount of steps. For example: Joaquin Phoenix — he appeared with Lucas Till in Walk the Line and Lucas was in X-Men: First Class with Kevin Bacon. That's a Bacon number of two.

That might've been a tricky one, except that I didn't trust my own brainpower and instead just typed "Joaquin Phoenix Bacon Number" into Google search. Wham, bam, Bacon number is two, now the fun is gone and it feels kind of like cheating at Words With Friends using an anagram app.

As the Vancouver Sun points out, there has been an Oracle of Bacon with a database it uses to figure out Bacon Numbers since 1996 using IMDB and other movie sites in its algorithm.

Also? Never would've guessed Judy Garland's Bacon Number is only two. Okay so this might be a kind of fun time-waster, but I'm still going to play the game sans Internet when sitting around bored with friends.
 

aria

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Awesome. I've noted they don't seem to count "Forrest Gump" like usage of Presidents, but it does use documentaries.

These older actors are astonishingly close:

John Wayne's Bacon number is 2

Charlie Chaplin's Bacon number is 2

Buster Keaton's Bacon number is 2

Lillian Gish's Bacon number is 2

Rudolph Valentino's Bacon number is 3

D. W. Griffith's Bacon number is 4 (he appeared in some of his own movies)

Some presidents:

Lyndon B. Johnson's Bacon number is 3

John F. Kennedy's Bacon number is 3

Dwight D. Eisenhower's Bacon number is 3

Theodore Roosevelt's Bacon number is 3

William McKinley's Bacon number is 4

Richard Nixon, FDR and Harry Truman didn't work. :crying:

EDIT: William Rufus Shafter Bacon number is 7 [Union Soldier who died in 1909]

Also no Herbert Hoover, Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Woodrow Wilson, William Howard Taft, Grover Cleveland... there are conflicting claims online. It might not work right.
 

Xian Xi

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I used to play this all the time, I knew one of my co-workers was cheating when one of his answers included an unknown actor that played an extra. So we made a rule that you need to use A and B list actors only.

iirc, the last one we did was Charlie Chaplin.

Edit: Just saw Bobak's post about Charlie Chaplin being 2, that's in 2012 but back in 2001 it was 3.

Charlie Chaplin and Sophia Loren in Countess from Hong Kong, Sophia and Kevin Pollak in Grumpier Old Men, Kevin and Kevin in A Few Good Men.
 
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neojedi

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Half of the entertainment is seeing the list of films it spits out to make the Bacon connection.


Andy Warhol's Bacon number is 3
Andy Warhol and Mary Woronov appeared in Silent Night, Bloody Night.
Mary Woronov and Lori Singer appeared in Warlock.
Lori Singer and Kevin Bacon appeared in Footloose.

Edit: It's crazy how many names work; I was plugging in Asian and Bollywood actors for awhile and getting results. Most famous musicians work as well, including jazz era stars. One name that I'm surprised didn't work is Georges Méliès. It's possible to create your own ~6 part Georges Méliès connection pretty easily, but I'm guessing that so many of his films are lost that it's impossible to be certain how low his Bacon number actually is.
 
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Xian Xi

JammaNationX,
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Half of the entertainment is seeing the list of films it spits out to make the Bacon connection.


Andy Warhol's Bacon number is 3
Andy Warhol and Mary Woronov appeared in Silent Night, Bloody Night.
Mary Woronov and Lori Singer appeared in Warlock.
Lori Singer and Kevin Bacon appeared in Footloose.

Edit: It's crazy how many names work; I was plugging in Asian and Bollywood actors for awhile and getting results. Most famous musicians work as well, including jazz era stars. One name that I'm surprised didn't work is Georges Méliès. It's possible to create your own ~6 part Georges Méliès connection pretty easily, but I'm guessing that so many of his films are lost that it's impossible to be certain how low his Bacon number actually is.

Do it with A and B list actors instead.
 
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