Adding to the list of fun Google features, the search giant has now injected “six degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon” into its search.
Six degrees of Kevin Bacon is a variation on the long-standing theory of “six degrees of separation”, which holds that everyone in the world can be linked to each other through no more than six people.
The theory has morphed into a trivia game for movie buffs, whereby players try to find the shortest path between any random actor and Kevin Bacon. Now Google will do that automatically.
Google says: “Google's Knowledge Graph maps real-world people, entities, and the connections between them, and what better way to demonstrate the relationships between people and things in the world than by playing the famed game of 'six degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon'?”
Google users can test out the new feature by using the search term [bacon number] and the name of a celebrity or public figure.
Speaking to Hollywood Reporter, manager of Google's research and development centre in Israel, Yossi Matias, says the motivation behind the new feature was to demonstrate the power of Google's search engine by finding the deeply rooted connections between people.
"It's interesting that this small-world phenomenon when applied to the world of actors actually shows that in most cases, most actors aren't that far apart from each other," Matias said, referring to the fact that the average Bacon number is two.
Small social world
Last year, Yahoo and Facebook started their own “Small World Experiment” to test the hypothesis that anyone in the world can get a message to anyone else in just six degrees of separation by passing it from friend to friend. The experiment appears to still be ongoing.
The hypothesis was first famously tested in 1967 by sociologist Stanley Milgram. Milgram sent about 300 letters to randomly selected individuals in Omaha, Nebraska, with the only instruction to get their letter to a “target” individual (a stockbroker in Boston).
They were given basic information about the target, including his name, occupation and address. The senders then sent the letter on to someone who they thought might be closer to the target than they were.
Milgram found that the average number of steps in a chain that reached the target was six. The majority of chains did, however, not reach the target - prompting speculation that most people in the world actually can't reach each other.
The Small World Experiment by Yahoo and Facebook uses the same basic method, but all sending and receiving is done via Facebook - leveraging the social network's considerable social graph.
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