This impromptu Kevin Bacon marathon caused the three friends to remark on the multitude of movies which included Bacon. It seemed like he was in everything! This was before the movie Sleepers had been released, so the answer was no. And so the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon was born. Today, the game is well-known, both for being a fun game to play with friends, as well as a classic homework problem in many computer science classes.
The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game is actually a problem in graph theory. Every actor is assigned to a vertex, and an edge is added between two actors if they have appeared together in a movie.
Then, the problem of connecting a given actor to Kevin Bacon in the fewest number of steps becomes a traditional graph theory problem — finding the shortest path between two vertices.
There are many shortest path algorithms that could be applied to this problem. For the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, we are only concerned with finding the shortest path in terms of the number of connecting movies edges used, so each edge can be thought of as having weight 1. The breadth-first search BFS algorithm operates by processing vertices in layers: Those closest to the source vertex are evaluated first, and those most distant are evaluated last.
Associated with each vertex is a number , which is the cost of getting from the source vertex to vertex. In our application, the cost after running the BFS algorithm is the Bacon number of the actor associated with vertex. If is the source vertex, we initialize the costs with and for all. The "Six Degrees" game has also inspired a website, The Oracle of Bacon , which lets people type in any actor's name to see how closely they link with the "Footloose" actor.
The site assigns each celeb a "Bacon number" to show the number of degrees of separation between the two. Google now lets users type "Bacon number" in the search field, followed by an actor's name, to produce the same result. It's rare to find a veteran actor who is not linked to Bacon in some way, and rarer still to find a Bacon number of 4 or higher.
Bacon, currently filming the second season of his Fox drama "The Following," admitted Saturday that he occasionally needs to use The Oracle of Bacon himself. That way I can go on the set and say, 'Good to see you,' or 'Good to see you again. Several other celebrities with tenuous ties to Bacon joined him onstage Saturday, including actress Felicia Day, who noted that "'Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon' is really the idea of social media before there was social media.
The talk closed with fellow panelist Lance Ulanoff, editor of tech site Mashable, shooting a Vine video of Bacon with the audience waving in the background. That way, Bacon said, everyone in attendance in Austin is now just one degree of separation away from him. No problem, a simple query will give you just that. But with all these connections, the result set grows very quickly. As you can see, the power and capabilities of graph databases are second-to-none when it comes to analyzing relationships.
You can easily begin to see the value of such platforms for use in social media, but there are a number of other use cases as well. Neo4j talks about seven major use cases. Here are just a few examples:.
So, if you encounter such a use case, be sure to check out a graph database. It might just prove to be your best option. Bacon decided to parlay the game into something that could have a positive impact on the world. Thus, in , SixDegrees. Header Image from The Wisdom Daily. Ken Flerlage, April 2, Twitter LinkedIn Tableau Public. No comments:. Subscribe to: Post Comments Atom. Follow Us!
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