Six Degrees of Francis Bacon

cmu.edu

11 points·Schiphol··9 comments

A further step in this direction would be a git-style dependency graph of influential books, showing how authors were inspired by each other to "fork" and improve ideas.

And a video tour here http://www.sixdegreesoffrancisbacon.com/

Prediction: the next big thing in fan wikis will be a similar 6º of, say, Frodo Baggins.

"St. Elsewhere is the Kevin Bacon of TV shows" [1]

[1] http://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/19892/what-is-the-...

Counterprediction: not enough characters to have a meaningful graph beyond 2-3 degrees.

I'm actually a little shocked that they don't at all mention Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon in this, which surely must have been at least in part the inspiration for it. (The Oracle of Bacon - http://oracleofbacon.org/ - still cheerfully works after, oh, a decade and a half or so.)

And to go further the inspiration for Bacon Number is the Erdős Number: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s_number

And a fun combination of them is the Erdős–Bacon number (Carl Sagan with 6, Natalie Portman with 7).

Then, finally (for now), you have Erdos-Bacon-Sabbath numbers (http://timeblimp.com/?page_id=195)

I'm a little shocked that you mentioned Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon without mentioning the Erdős number.

It would be kind of neat to extend semantic search and social graphing to older works - really neat to see how different minds' work interweaves throughout history.

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