Given my family background, I’m happy to learn how I’m attached to the more crazy of the artists on the chart, but that’s just a personal preference. You can even use the chart in reverse order by finding out how you have some type of connection to Kevin Bacon with people in your life and then follow that connection to see how many degrees from that point you’re attached to these brainy individuals. This concept is based on small world theory, a longstanding serious look at the degrees of separation between us. TIP: The Kevin Bacon game assigns a bacon number to a person based on how many of degrees of separation there is between the person and Kevin Bacon.
Movie buffs revel in the conceptknown in academic circles as the small-world phenomenonwith the trivia game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, wherein players aim to link any Hollywood actor to Bacon through six films or fewer. Most people have about 6 degrees of separation ( Small World theory ), but not everyone has 6 degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon or any other given person. The theory holds that, on average, each of us is at most six connections away from anyone else in the world. The chart even breaks each connection up into Friends, Lovers and Family to show how far the connection must go before a new connection is made. John Guare coined the phrase with his eponymous 1990 play. The chart, which shows how Pablo Picasso and Mark Twain are attached to Mary Shelly and various other brainy counterparts is well thought out and even color coded to show which group each person fits into such as actors, architects, painters and others. Ever play the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game In 1994, three college students, including an Italian American (Mike Ginelli), came up with a verbal parlor exercise in which actor Kevin Bacon is linked to every actor in the universe via a process of elimination. It’s believed that everyone in the world can be linked together by no more than 6 degrees of separation and of course all those connections lead back to Kevin Bacon, so why not put that knowledge to “good” use with a handy flowchart of genius.