Oracle of Bacon

Why Trust Techopedia

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.

Advertisements

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.

Advertisements

Related Terms

Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist
Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.