Six degrees of Kevin Bacon calculator now live on Google

It has been quite some time since the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon meme was in the spotlight. For those who might have missed it, the concept entails that there exists no one working in Hollywood that is more than six movies (or contacts) away from Kevin Bacon himself. It is based on the old concept of six degrees of separation, which claims that no two people are further than six contacts or acquaintances apart.

Google has a reputation for bringing back the obscure and having a little fun on their famed search engine. If you require examples, simply type Zerg Rush or do a barrel roll into a Google search. Now, Google has gone a step further and added a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon Calculator. It uses the premise described above to determine an actor’s “bacon score.” A bacon score is how many contacts any actor is away from the famed Kevin Bacon.

How does it work?

It’s a pretty simple. All you have to do is ask Google what any given actor’s bacon number is. For instance, if you search for Mark Wahlberg’s bacon number, it comes up as 2. Google will then tell you exactly how they came to that number. In Mark Wahlberg’s case, he and Steve Carell appeared together in the movie Date Night. Steve Carell and Kevin Bacon appeared together in the movie Crazy, Stupid, Love. Thus Mark Wahlberg’s bacon number is 2.

As an additional little Easter Egg, this has also been added to Google Now. Open the voice search, ask for an actor’s bacon number, and it will pop right up on the screen for you. As you can see from the image at the top, Kevin Bacon’s own bacon number is zero.

For now, you can only search for actors and even then, some actors aren’t recognized to work with the system. It should work for the most popular and most of those currently active in Hollywood.

So far, no one has been able to find a bacon number higher than 4. Mark Zuckerberg scores a 4. What did your favorite actor score?

Image Credit: The Consumerist