Bacon Number
Updated 2026-08-05
INTRODUCTION
English translation pending.
CORE DEFINITION
Popularized in the 1990s and formalized in the trivia game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, an actor's Bacon number is the minimum number of film collaborations linking them to Kevin Bacon, who has worked across a very wide range of productions. The measure is a shortest-path distance in a bipartite actor-film collaboration graph, the same structure behind the Erdos number in mathematics. It quantifies network centrality and reachability rather than personal closeness, and small numbers indicate proximity to a highly connected hub.
SCAFFOLDING EFFECT
Reduce cognitive load
- Find the hub: locate the person with near-zero distance to everyone in the target circle. - Route through them: use the best-connected node as your entry point instead of cold outreach. - Map reachability: plot distances to see which parts of a network you can actually touch.
Anchor fast decisions
Collaboration networks are small-world graphs: a few actors accumulate hundreds of credits and act as hubs, so almost every node sits within a few hops of them. Because path length is measured in shared work rather than friendship, a single credit can collapse an entire distance. The metric therefore rewards connectivity volume, not depth of relationship.
MINIMUM ACTION
In progress 0/1Practice this model in one real situation:
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Source support: Explicit
- zh.wikipedia.orghttps://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%87%AF%E6%96%87verified
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