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Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon hits Google

Los Angeles - The popular party game which requires an extensive and detailed knowledge of Kevin Bacon, has been built into Google, reports The Guardian.

Created by students in 1994, the original game called Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon was based upon the theory that it is always possible to connect every actor in the world back to Kevin Bacon in less than six associations.

Search engine giant Google has now made it possible for you to play the game via their search engine.

Will prove power of Google


Lead engineer on the project, Yossi Matias, told the Hollywood Reporter that the project was used to prove the power of the search engine by flagging the deep-rooted connections between people in the film industry.

"If you think about search engines in the traditional sense, for years it has been to try and match, find pages and sources where you would find the text. 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 apart from each other. And most of them have a relatively small Bacon number," Matias said.

To use the tool, a user simply types the words the name of the actor followed by the words "bacon number" into the Google search bar.



As an example, if you type in Ryan Gosling, it will show you that Ryan has a Bacon Number of one, since both of them starred in Crazy Stupid Love. Even Justin Bieber can be linked to Kevin Bacon and has four bacon numbers linking them.

When asked about his reaction to the original game in the 90s, Bacon said he was initially uncomfortable with the idea, but came to see it in a positive light.

*Try the game and let us know if you came up with an actor who doesn't have any connections. Send us a mail and you might get published.

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