Chapter 1: Understanding Six Degrees of Separation

The concept of six degrees of separation suggests that any individual can be linked to any other individual through a chain of no more than five people. This intriguing theory became closely associated with the well-known actor Kevin Bacon, and here's the story behind that connection.

The idea was first introduced by Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy in 1929 through a short story titled Chains. In this narrative, characters engage in a game where they attempt to connect any person globally with just five intermediaries.

In the 1950s, mathematicians Manfred Kochen from IBM and Ithiel de Sola Pool from MIT sought to validate this theory mathematically. While they framed it as a probability model indicating high likelihoods of connections through a maximum of two intermediaries, they were unable to reach a complete solution.

In 1967, sociologist Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment that tested this theory. He randomly selected individuals in Kansas and Nebraska and tasked them with sending letters to an unknown recipient in Boston. The participants were instructed to send their letters to someone who might know the target, based solely on the recipient's name, job, and location. The findings revealed that the letters typically passed through six intermediaries before reaching their destination. Milgram's work was published in Psychology Today, which led to the popularization of the term "six degrees of separation."

Fast forward to 2001, Columbia University's Duncan Watts replicated Milgram's experiment, utilizing email messages instead of physical letters. In this larger-scale study involving 48,000 senders across 157 countries, he reaffirmed the six-link concept. Subsequent validations came from Microsoft in 2008 and Facebook in 2016, with the latter managing to reduce the average number of links to just three.

The cultural phenomenon linking Kevin Bacon to this theory took off in 1994, when three students from Albright College—Craig Fass, Mike Ginelli, and Brian Turtle—came up with a game while snowed in, watching television. After viewing Footloose and then Quicksilver, both starring Bacon, they realized the actor seemed omnipresent in films. They started connecting actors to Bacon, beginning with Robert De Niro, leading to the genesis of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, where players try to link any actor to Bacon within six degrees or fewer. The game quickly gained traction on campus and later gained national attention through appearances on The Jon Stewart Show and The Howard Stern Show.

Additionally, a computer game developed by Brett C. Tjaden at the University of Virginia in 1996 employed the Internet Movie Database to connect various actors to Bacon. This platform, known as the Oracle of Bacon, was recognized by Time magazine as one of the best websites of the year. It continues to operate today, and in 2012, Google even launched a feature called the “Bacon number” to help users find their connections to Bacon.

Chapter 2: Kevin Bacon's Perspective on the Game

Initially, Kevin Bacon had a negative reaction to the game, feeling it mocked his career by associating him with other actors he considered more esteemed. During the South by Southwest Conference in 2014, he shared that he was initially confused about the game's popularity and felt ridiculed. However, he eventually embraced the concept and even created a platform called SixDegrees.org in 2007, which aimed to connect individuals with charitable causes.

Bacon's extensive career spans numerous blockbuster films, and the idea of connecting him to other actors typically results in a maximum of two intermediaries. The original creators of the game even authored a book titled Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, which included a board game and an introduction by Bacon himself, released in 1996. However, they have since pursued different paths, with Ginelli moving into investment banking, Turtle into marketing, and Fass into the culinary arts.

Kevin Bacon participates in a fun game showcasing the connections between actors in Hollywood.

Kevin Bacon discusses his initial thoughts on the six degrees game and how it evolved over time.