GOOGLE HELPS YOU FIND THE CLOSENESS EXISTING BETWEEN TWO ACTORS
How close are movie actors between them? Now you can find out! Google gives you the opportunity to do it. You only have to type in Bacon Number and it will give you access to a page named The Oracle Bacon. There you can enter any name of any celebrity and you will see how close they are. You will notice that amazingly, in a way or another, all actors are related.
Why would they create such a site? Well, the idea comes from the play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon where it is demonstrated that everyone is connected to any other person through at most other six people. After the play, a movie and lots of drinking games were created and had a huge success mostly in the USA. Now the website.
The motivation behind this project is also and most of all to demonstrate the power of Google’s search engine. The project will be extended eventually to everybody (and not only 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”, Matias said, Engineering Director and Head of the Israeli Engineering Center.
You can try it yourself and you will see. Most Bacon numbers are quite low. In fact, Ryan Gosling’s Bacon number is just one, Barack Obama’s is two, and so is Marlon Brando’s. “It’s interesting that this small-world of actors actually shows that in most cases, most actors aren’t that far from each other. And most of them have a relatively small Bacon number” Matias added.
The only thing left to do is trying yourself and let us know what you think!
A cura di Flavia Nicolò
(13 settembre 2012)
