Google engineers are so good at their jobs, they apparently have plenty of time at work to tackle the really pressing problems facing the world today. For example — who wants to sit around and use their very own brains to try and figure out how far apart any given actor is from Kevin Bacon?

A quick lesson for those who aren’t familiar with the game: Someone names an actor or actress and participants then try to name movies they’ve been in, linked by actors in those films and try to get back to someonewho’s been in a movie with Kevin Bacon in the shortest amount of steps. For example: Joaquin Phoenix — he appeared with Lucas Till in Walk the Line and Lucas was in X-Men: First Class with Kevin Bacon. That’s a Bacon number of two.

That might’ve been a tricky one, except that I didn’t trust my own brainpower and instead just typed “Joaquin Phoenix Bacon Number” into Google search. Wham, bam, Bacon number is two, now the fun is gone and it feels kind of like cheating at Words With Friends using an anagram app.

As the Vancouver Sun points out, there has been an Oracle of Bacon with a database it uses to figure out Bacon Numbers since 1996 using IMDB and other movie sites in its algorithm.

Also? Never would’ve guessed Judy Garland’s Bacon Number is only two. Okay so this might be a kind of fun time-waster, but I’m still going to play the game sans Internet when sitting around bored with friends.

What’s your Bacon Number? Google unveils Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon function [Vancouver Sun]

 

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