Degree of separation between two actors

This is an implementation of a breadth-first-search algorithm that looks in a local copy of the IMDB database to find the shortest path between two actors by choosing a sequence of movies that connects them.

It was made as an activity for the Harvard’s Course CS50’s Introduction to Artificial Intelligence with python.

The idea (taken from here)

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.”

Implementation

Look in my repo, download the files and run

$ python degrees.py

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