Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon or Bacon's Law is a parlor game where players challenge each other to choose an actor whom they connect to another actor via a film in which both actors appeared: this is repeated to try to find the shortest path that leads to prolific American actor Kevin Bacon. It rests on the assumption that anyone involved in the Hollywood film industry can be linked through their film roles to Bacon within six steps. The game's name is a reference to "six degrees of separation", a concept that posits that any two people on Earth are six or fewer acquaintance links apart.
Creator here - yeah, proving photo provenance has gotten more challenging. When I started this in 2019, if you found a photo of Alice Cooper with Colonel Sanders on an old blog, you could safely apply Occam’s razor: “Would anyone bother meticulously photoshopping this?” Since relaunching this year, I have to scrutinize sources much more closely, and adding richer metadata/context has become essential. Maybe in the future, new photos only work if this lives inside something like World App.
Creator here – everyone on the site right now is connected, and you can imagine how everyone living today could be added with photos that already exist! The really interesting cases are the historic outliers – like Harriet Tubman, Edgar Allan Poe – who were photographed with others but still can’t be linked into the main graph from anything I’ve found so far. I’m working on a write-up about these “most wanted” isolates.
I was wondering about some of those people of whom supposedly only a very few photos exist (like Thomas Pynchon). Presumably though they could just exclude those people from the list.
Pynchon is on my dream list of people to be able to eventually add. For now, I like to imagine he is in the background of every photo with an NYC crowd over the last 60 years.
This is really cool. I'm curious how the OP is calculating the shortest path -- recursive CTEs in Postgres? pgRouting? A graph db?
I recently built an explorer UI for a cultural knowledge graph: https://giraf.app/graph. I used recursive CTEs to find the longest paths through the graph, as a proxy for interestingness. Basically to answer the question: starting from a user post about a book, movie, song, etc., where is it possible to end up?
If the OP might be interested in using the visualization framework I've built, as a way of letting users browse the relationships between photographs, please get in touch.
Congrats again on bringing an awesome project to life!
Creator here — the site runs a shortest-path search over the set of photos I’ve manually verified. Thanks for pointing this out, I just added Carson-Leno and Leno-Cooper, so now their interview guests are all down to a couple hops. Talk show hosts are major connectors! Letterman is a real skeleton key to the 20th century, he interviewed Edward Bernays who has a pic with Eleanor Roosevelt, and it all pops off from there.
I tried a connection with John Frusciante (guitarist in Red Hot Chili Peppers) and while he was in the photo, his face was tagged as Chad Smith who was not in the photo and a woman with a mask covering her face was tagged as John. I didn't see an obvious way to identify a unique image except for an attribute in the HTML which was "15552" if that helps.
I see! I can imagine them as serious connective tissue, who else interviews royalty/presidents one day and young pop idols the next. Again, really cool project, thanks for sharing!
That would be an interesting topic to analyze. Generate random parings of people and compute the paths between them, then tally the people who show up most frequently in the connections.
This reminds me of the turnpike property in optimization: for some optimization problems, no matter what the initial and final conditions are, the optimal path passes through the same section. Then you can exploit this to simplify the problem as getting onto this highway and getting off at the right times.
You basically have to take a trip through Rogan's studio if you're trying to connect, say, a WCW midcarder and Roger Penrose, which is the exact curiosity this site exists to fulfill.
Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon or Bacon's Law is a parlor game where players challenge each other to choose an actor whom they connect to another actor via a film in which both actors appeared: this is repeated to try to find the shortest path that leads to prolific American actor Kevin Bacon. It rests on the assumption that anyone involved in the Hollywood film industry can be linked through their film roles to Bacon within six steps. The game's name is a reference to "six degrees of separation", a concept that posits that any two people on Earth are six or fewer acquaintance links apart.
~~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacon%27s_law
See also: Erdős number
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s_number
And the related XKCD https://www.xkcd.com/599/
I wonder if there is an XKCD number: how many ref outs until you can find an XKCD comic?
See also: Erdős–Bacon number
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdős–Bacon_number
I just find it interesting how any new data added to this past the year 2023 is probably unusable
Creator here - yeah, proving photo provenance has gotten more challenging. When I started this in 2019, if you found a photo of Alice Cooper with Colonel Sanders on an old blog, you could safely apply Occam’s razor: “Would anyone bother meticulously photoshopping this?” Since relaunching this year, I have to scrutinize sources much more closely, and adding richer metadata/context has become essential. Maybe in the future, new photos only work if this lives inside something like World App.
All these neo techno spiritualist "we are all connected" mumbo jumbo and I still can't connect to an amazon rep to re-activate my business account.
Email jeff@amazon.com, it's an unofficial escalation process that still works.
I'm printing and framing this on my wall
Is the graph connected? I think it might be interesting to show two well known people who can't be connected in this method.
Creator here – everyone on the site right now is connected, and you can imagine how everyone living today could be added with photos that already exist! The really interesting cases are the historic outliers – like Harriet Tubman, Edgar Allan Poe – who were photographed with others but still can’t be linked into the main graph from anything I’ve found so far. I’m working on a write-up about these “most wanted” isolates.
I was wondering about some of those people of whom supposedly only a very few photos exist (like Thomas Pynchon). Presumably though they could just exclude those people from the list.
Pynchon is on my dream list of people to be able to eventually add. For now, I like to imagine he is in the background of every photo with an NYC crowd over the last 60 years.
This is really cool. I'm curious how the OP is calculating the shortest path -- recursive CTEs in Postgres? pgRouting? A graph db?
I recently built an explorer UI for a cultural knowledge graph: https://giraf.app/graph. I used recursive CTEs to find the longest paths through the graph, as a proxy for interestingness. Basically to answer the question: starting from a user post about a book, movie, song, etc., where is it possible to end up?
If the OP might be interested in using the visualization framework I've built, as a way of letting users browse the relationships between photographs, please get in touch.
Congrats again on bringing an awesome project to life!
I chose "Johnny Carson" and "Anderson Cooper", and it picked a pretty circuitous route involving Letterman and Obama.
Surely they could just be connected through Leno, for example.
Either it's a path problem or just a collection size problem I suppose. Cool nonetheless!
Creator here — the site runs a shortest-path search over the set of photos I’ve manually verified. Thanks for pointing this out, I just added Carson-Leno and Leno-Cooper, so now their interview guests are all down to a couple hops. Talk show hosts are major connectors! Letterman is a real skeleton key to the 20th century, he interviewed Edward Bernays who has a pic with Eleanor Roosevelt, and it all pops off from there.
Is there an easy way to report inaccuracies?
I tried a connection with John Frusciante (guitarist in Red Hot Chili Peppers) and while he was in the photo, his face was tagged as Chad Smith who was not in the photo and a woman with a mask covering her face was tagged as John. I didn't see an obvious way to identify a unique image except for an attribute in the HTML which was "15552" if that helps.
I see! I can imagine them as serious connective tissue, who else interviews royalty/presidents one day and young pop idols the next. Again, really cool project, thanks for sharing!
That would be an interesting topic to analyze. Generate random parings of people and compute the paths between them, then tally the people who show up most frequently in the connections.
Joe Rogan is the grand central station of the network of time.
This reminds me of the turnpike property in optimization: for some optimization problems, no matter what the initial and final conditions are, the optimal path passes through the same section. Then you can exploit this to simplify the problem as getting onto this highway and getting off at the right times.
You basically have to take a trip through Rogan's studio if you're trying to connect, say, a WCW midcarder and Roger Penrose, which is the exact curiosity this site exists to fulfill.
How was the list of people compiled. Seems to be missing some philsophers.
Wanted to make a connection betwern Martin Heidegger and Tim Heidecker. Alas.
The “Discover Connections” button did nothing as I tried it then it put me on 24 hour lockout.
The original Show HN, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28456413
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
The Network Of Time: Choose any two people to see how they connect thorough time - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42105262 - Nov 2024 (8 comments)
Show HN: Network Of Time – visualize connections between notable people - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28456413 - Sept 2021 (4 comments)