Oracle of Bacon

What Does Oracle of Bacon Mean?

The Oracle of Bacon is a website the was inspired by the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, a trivia game that rests on the assumption that any actor can be linked to actor Kevin Bacon within six steps. The site allows users to determine how two actors are linked or, more prominently, to find an actor’s Bacon Number, which refers to how many links are needed to connect a given actor or actress to Kevin Bacon.

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Techopedia Explains Oracle of Bacon

The Oracle of Bacon website downloads information from several databases on a regular basis to continually build a map of actors and movies. The database server uses a breadth-first search to find the links between an actor and Kevin Bacon, and to determine the shortest path. The Oracle also caches the results of answered queries so that it will be able to retrieve results for the same actor more quickly. According to the website, a Bacon Number of more than four is very rare.

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Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…