6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon

I can't remember when I first heard of "6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon."
I know we talked about it around the time I was in college/post college.
I heard that it was created as a drinking game at Cornell during a snowstorm--which is close but it was actually Albright College in PA--and yes, created as a drinking game by 3 college friends during a snowstorm.

In a Premiere interview for the film "The River Wild," Kevin Bacon commented that he's worked with everybody in Hollywood or someone who's worked with them. About the same time, there was a newsgroup thread entitled "Kevin Bacon is the Center of the Universe" followed by "the game." The game "6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon" was created by three students at Albright College, who were snowed in and watching "Footloose" followed by "Quicksilver" when they began to discuss how many movies Bacon had been in and how many people they could connect to him. They wrote Jon Stewart with their theory of "Kevin Bacon was the center of the entertainment universe" and explaining the game, and the world took it from there!

While Bacon didn't like it at first, he embraced it and eventually wrote the introduction to the book, approved of the game and even played it up on a VISA commerical and on TV's "Will and Grace." In 2007, Bacon started a charitable organization named SixDegrees.org.

For some flashback fun, check out the Oracle of Bacon: http://oracleofbacon.org/how.html
Every couple of weeks the Oracle downloads several database files from one of the Internet Movie Database's FTP sites containing around 1,250,000 actors and actresses, around 850,000 movies and TV shows, and around 150,000 nicknames.

The Oracle builds a big map of actors and movies and stores it in a 115 MB database.
The server handles three different types of requests:
Find the link from Actor A to Actor B.
How good a "center" is a given actor?
Who are all the people with an Actor A number of N?

There are several CGI programs -- one for each of the above types of queries -- that run on the UVA Computer Science department web server, which all connect to the database server using TCP.
The database server uses a breadth-first search to find the shortest path between pairs of actors.

SO...if you want to connect Jackie Chan to Kevin Bacon, which was one of the more difficult ones way back when (and I remember having to use "The Cannonball Run") but now it seems pretty easy...
The Oracle says: kevin bacon has a Chan, Jackie (I) number of 2.
Kevin Bacon was in Big Picture, The (1989) with John Cleese
John Cleese was in Around the World in 80 Days (2004) with Jackie Chan (I)

Want to waste even more time?
Check out these links...

http://www-distance.syr.edu/bacon.html
http://www.thekevinbacongame.com/
http://www.geocities.com/theeac/bacon.html