The Oracle of Bacon Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon • Link people to Kevin Bacon based on movies they have been in together Morgan Freeman was in Se7en with Brad Pitt Brad Pitt was in Sleepers with Kevin Bacon • Morgan Freeman has a Bacon number of 2 • Who has a Bacon number of 4 or more? Centers of the Hollywood Universe • 739,979 people can be connected to Bacon • Is he the center of the Hollywood Universe? – No! – Who is? – Who are other good centers? – What makes them good centers? The Oracle of Bacon Internet Movie Database Web server Linking oracleofbacon.org Engine • Linking Engine: – Is written in C – Stores all movie data in memory – Answers link, number, and center queries – Doesn’t actually use Oracle™ Inside the Linking Engine • All three types of queries use breadth-first search BN = 1 Sean Penn Tim Robbins BN = 0 Mystic River Tom Hanks Kevin Bacon Apollo 13 Bill Paxton Footloose Sarah Jessica Parker John Lithgow Inside the Linking Engine • All three types of queries use breadth-first search BN = 2 Woody Allen Sweet and Lowdown BN = 1 Judge Reinhold Fast Times at Ridgemont High Sean Penn Miranda Otto War of the Worlds Tim Robbins Mystic River BN = 0 The Shawshank Redemption Morgan Freeman Tom Hanks Kevin Bacon Apollo 13 Cast Away Helen Hunt Bill Paxton Forrest Gump Footloose Sarah Jessica Parker Sally Field Tombstone John Lithgow A Simple Plan Val Kilmer Billy Bob Thornton Inside the Linking Engine • Link Val Kilmer to Kevin Bacon BN = 2 Woody Allen Sweet and Lowdown BN = 1 Judge Reinhold Fast Times at Ridgemont High Sean Penn Miranda Otto War of the Worlds Tim Robbins Mystic River BN = 0 The Shawshank Redemption Morgan Freeman Tom Hanks Kevin Bacon Apollo 13 Cast Away Helen Hunt Bill Paxton Forrest Gump Footloose Sarah Jessica Parker Sally Field Tombstone John Lithgow A Simple Plan Val Kilmer Billy Bob Thornton Inside the Linking Engine • How good a center is Kevin Bacon? – Average everyone’s Bacon number – Currently 2.963, ranked 1222nd • Who is exactly 2 hops away from Kevin Bacon? – This whole column – Currently 163,002 people Woody Allen Sweet and Lowdown Judge Reinhold Fast Times at Ridgemont High Sean Penn Miranda Otto War of the Worlds Tim Robbins Mystic River The Shawshank Redemption Morgan Freeman Tom Hanks Kevin Bacon Apollo 13 Cast Away Bill Paxton Helen Hunt Forrest Gump Footloose Sarah Jessica Parker Sally Field Tombstone John Lithgow A Simple Plan Val Kilmer Billy Bob Thornton Caching • Keep whole BFS trees for common queries – Takes about 4MB of memory each • Perform 75-85% fewer BFS calculations – Faster website response time Spel Cheking • Oracle of Bacon users can’t spell – Dan Ackroyd Dan Aykroyd – Mike Meyers Mike Myers – Sally Fields Sally Field • Show everyone with an edit distance of 3 or fewer Jake JXillenhallX X Gy a A little bit of history • Craig Fass, Mike Ginelli, and Brian Turtle invented it as a drinking game at Albright College • Brett Tjaden and Glenn Wasson put it on the web at UVA in 1995 • I have run it since 1999 – Full rewrite, with caching and spell check • Oracles of Baseball, TV stars, and corporate executives Emails I get • Journalists • Actors and actress (and one porn star) • “Help me write an Oracle of such-and-such” • “Why isn’t so-and-so in your database?” = “I can’t spell” = “I don’t know the difference between actors and characters (and animals and muppets)” • “Why do you link through documentaries?” • “Please tell me who has a Bacon number of 8”.