HN Reader

Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon or Bacon's Law is a parlor game where players challenge each other to choose an actor whom they connect to another actor via a film in which both actors appeared: this is repeated to try to find the shortest path that leads to prolific American actor Kevin Bacon. It rests on the assumption that anyone involved in the Hollywood film industry can be linked through their film roles to Bacon within six steps. The game's name is a reference to "six degrees of separation", a concept that posits that any two people on Earth are six or fewer acquaintance links apart.

~~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacon%27s_law

I chose "Johnny Carson" and "Anderson Cooper", and it picked a pretty circuitous route involving Letterman and Obama.

Surely they could just be connected through Leno, for example.

Either it's a path problem or just a collection size problem I suppose. Cool nonetheless!

How was the list of people compiled. Seems to be missing some philsophers.

Wanted to make a connection betwern Martin Heidegger and Tim Heidecker. Alas.

The original Show HN, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28456413

This is really cool. I'm curious how the OP is calculating the shortest path -- recursive CTEs in Postgres? pgRouting? A graph db?

I recently built an explorer UI for a cultural knowledge graph: https://giraf.app/graph. I used recursive CTEs to find the longest paths through the graph, as a proxy for interestingness. Basically to answer the question: starting from a user post about a book, movie, song, etc., where is it possible to end up?

If the OP might be interested in using the visualization framework I've built, as a way of letting users browse the relationships between photographs, please get in touch.

Congrats again on bringing an awesome project to life!

I just find it interesting how any new data added to this past the year 2023 is probably unusable

Is the graph connected? I think it might be interesting to show two well known people who can't be connected in this method.

The “Discover Connections” button did nothing as I tried it then it put me on 24 hour lockout.

All these neo techno spiritualist "we are all connected" mumbo jumbo and I still can't connect to an amazon rep to re-activate my business account.

Joe Rogan is the grand central station of the network of time.