You May Now Cheat at 'Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon' with Google
by Andy NeuenschwanderA classic game just got a high-tech invention, and no, I'm not talking about electronic Battleship.
If you're a movie nut, chances are you've played Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon before. The rules are simple: pick a celebrity and find out how many degrees of separation they are from Kevin Bacon, based on appearances in movies and TV shows. For example: Kristen Stewart's "Bacon number" is 2, as she appeared with Michael Sheen in "Breaking Dawn," and Michael Sheen appeared with Kevin Bacon in "Frost/Nixon."
The fun of the game is finding the path from any celebrity to Kevin Bacon, and since theoretically every person on the planet is connected by no more than six degrees, you'll always find a way eventually. But if you don't, you can take a shot or something.
Now, thanks to Google, you can totally cheat at the game. The company has added a new search function allowing you to instantly find the Bacon number of any celebrity, living or dead. The search function is surprisingly thorough, as you can enter some pretty obscure names in there and still get a hit... but sorry, you can't put in your own name. Unless you're famous, I guess.
To try it out, just go to Google.com and type in "Bacon number" plus the name of the celebrity that you want to search. You may be surprised at how few steps there are from any one celebrity to the man himself.