A program that determines how many "degrees of separation" apart two hollywood actors are. Each degree consists of a film that two actors both starred in
According to the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, anyone in the Hollywood film industry can be connected to Kevin Bacon within six steps, where each step consists of finding a film that two actors both starred in
In this problem, we’re interested in finding the shortest path between any two actors by choosing a sequence of movies that connects them. For example, the shortest path between Jennifer Lawrence and Tom Hanks is 2: Jennifer Lawrence is connected to Kevin Bacon by both starring in “X-Men: First Class,” and Kevin Bacon is connected to Tom Hanks by both starring in “Apollo 13”
We can frame this as a search problem: our states are people. Our actions are movies, which take us from one actor to another (it’s true that a movie could take us to multiple different actors, but that’s okay for this problem). Our initial state and goal state are defined by the two people we’re trying to connect. By using breadth-first search, we can find the shortest path from one actor to another
There are two sets of data, one in small folder and another in large folder. Both contain three csv files, people.csv, movies.csv and stars.csv. Data in small folder is relatively tiny in size comparing to the data in large folder so it can be used to test the functionality of the program. Whereas in the large folder, all the data from IMDb's database is in the csv files
Movies.csvcontains information each movie's assigned ID, its title and release yearPeople.csvcontains information about each hollywood movie star's unique ID, corresponding to their ID in the IMDb's database, with their name and birth yearStars.csvestablishes a relationship between the movie stars in thepeople.csvand movies inmovies.csv, stating that which person starred in which movie
The main program is written in the degrees.py file, which utilizes some useful classes and functions in the util.py file
In the degrees directory, run the command
python degrees.py dataset
Where dataset is the name of the dataset folder
If you are using the large dataset, it will take some time for the data to load in. Then enter the hollywood movie star names as the program prompts, wait a bit for the program to search, and you will see the results
$ python degrees.py large
Loading data...
Data loaded.
Name: Emma Watson
Name: Jennifer Lawrence
3 degrees of separation.
1: Emma Watson and Brendan Gleeson starred in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
2: Brendan Gleeson and Michael Fassbender starred in Trespass Against Us
3: Michael Fassbender and Jennifer Lawrence starred in X-Men: First ClassInformation courtesy of IMDb. Used with permission.