Wikipedia: Bacon number

Difference (from prior major revision) (minor diff, author diff)

Changed: 3c3

* The Bacon number of actor or actress A is defined to be the minimum of the Bacon numbers of all the actors or actresses with whom M appeared in a movie produced by a major studio, plus one.

* The Bacon number of actor or actress A is defined to be the minimum of the Bacon numbers of all the actors or actresses with whom A appeared in a movie produced by a major studio, plus one.

Removed: 6,7d5

Movies with no actors are ignored as are movies with only one actor
(Although some people claim actors who only appeared in a single movie and were the only actor in that movie have a Bacon Number of +infinity by definition.)

Kevin Bacon is well known for a college movie trivia game called [Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon]?, which is intended to find the Bacon number of an arbitrary actor or actress. The Bacon number of an actor or actress is determined as follows:

Kevin Bacon has a Bacon number of zero.
The Bacon number of actor or actress A is defined to be the minimum of the Bacon numbers of all the actors or actresses with whom A appeared in a movie produced by a major studio, plus one.

It is an unproven theorem of this game that everyone who has ever appeared in any movie has a finite Bacon number.

The Bacon number is an application of the same idea as the Erdos number in Mathematics to the movie industry.

Links:

The Oracle of Bacon at Virginia (http://www.cs.virginia.edu/oracle/) computes the Bacon number of any actor or actress from IMDb data