http://oracleofbacon.org/

The common game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon is an example of the small world phenomenon.  The object of the game is to connect a given actor to Kevin Bacon through connecting movie roles in as few steps as possible, but no more than 6 steps.  The website http://oracleofbacon.org/ has several tools on it to illustrate how the almost one million actors working in the movie/TV industry in the past century can all be connected to Kevin Bacon in a surprisingly short number of steps. 

The website is an effort by the University of Virginia Computer Science department.  It works by doing calculations on the movie database provided by the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com).  There is defined a Bacon number which is the weighted average of all the actors in the database’s connections to Kevin Bacon.  The Bacon number is 2.960, meaning, on average, any given actor can be linked to Kevin Bacon through less than 3 movies.  The website then looks at the question of whether or not Kevin Bacon is the most linkable actor in Hollywood.  The answer is no.  In fact there are 1,048 people who are better “centers” than Kevin Bacon. 

The website has a list of the 1000 best centers in Hollywood, as well as several tools that exhibit the power of the Oracle’s searching tools.  The most interesting is found here: http://oracleofbacon.org/star_links.html.  It allows you to enter any two actors/actresses and it will display the shortest path of movie connections between them as found in the IMDB movie database.  This website certainly shows that the movie industry is an example of the small world phenomenon.