Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon or Bacon's Law is a parlor game where players challenge each other to choose an actor whom they connect to another actor via a film in which both actors appeared: this is repeated to try to find the shortest path that leads to prolific American actor Kevin Bacon. It rests on the assumption that anyone involved in the Hollywood film industry can be linked through their film roles to Bacon within six steps. The game's name is a reference to "six degrees of separation", a concept that posits that any two people on Earth are six or fewer acquaintance links apart.
See also: Erdős number
I just find it interesting how any new data added to this past the year 2023 is probably unusable
I chose "Johnny Carson" and "Anderson Cooper", and it picked a pretty circuitous route involving Letterman and Obama.
Surely they could just be connected through Leno, for example.
Either it's a path problem or just a collection size problem I suppose. Cool nonetheless!
Creator here — the site runs a shortest-path search over the set of photos I’ve manually verified. Thanks for pointing this out, I just added Carson-Leno and Leno-Cooper, so now their interview guests are all down to a couple hops. Talk show hosts are major connectors! Letterman is a real skeleton key to the 20th century, he interviewed Edward Bernays who has a pic with Eleanor Roosevelt, and it all pops off from there.
Joe Rogan is the grand central station of the network of time.
Is the graph connected? I think it might be interesting to show two well known people who can't be connected in this method.
Creator here – everyone on the site right now is connected, and you can imagine how everyone living today could be added with photos that already exist! The really interesting cases are the historic outliers – like Harriet Tubman, Edgar Allan Poe – who were photographed with others but still can’t be linked into the main graph from anything I’ve found so far. I’m working on a write-up about these “most wanted” isolates.
I was wondering about some of those people of whom supposedly only a very few photos exist (like Thomas Pynchon). Presumably though they could just exclude those people from the list.
The original Show HN, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28456413
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
The Network Of Time: Choose any two people to see how they connect thorough time - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42105262 - Nov 2024 (8 comments)
Show HN: Network Of Time – visualize connections between notable people - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28456413 - Sept 2021 (4 comments)