That's pretty cool! 

But what happens if it doesn't find a link? It seemed to hang once when I tested with an American actor and a Swedish actor.

I think it might be a good idea to exclude compilation titles like That's Entertainment when one creates the export file. Those make it just too easy to link people.

It's surprising to see how difficult it is to find people who actually take six degrees to link. At least in a large collection like mine.

Quoting GSyren:

Quote:
That's pretty cool! 

But what happens if it doesn't find a link? It seemed to hang once when I tested with an American actor and a Swedish actor.

It depends on your collection size, your search depth and the search spheres these two actors are in.

For example when the start actor has a huge web of connections but that never lead to anything in the sphere of the smaller actor, then it will get stuck. Let me think about putting a maximum of search requests in there.

Have you tried searching from the Swedish actor to the American one? If the Swedish web is much smaller it should quickly give you an answer.

Thanks Karsten!

Still something not quite right, though.

John Wayne - Max von Sydow: 1 degree
Max von Sydow - Hans Alfredson: 1 degree
John Wayne - Hans Alfredson: Connection not found

Well, it's just for fun, so no biggie if it doesn't work 100%, but if you want my export file for testing, just let me know.

Quoting GSyren:

Quote:
Thanks Karsten!

Still something not quite right, though.

John Wayne - Max von Sydow: 1 degree
Max von Sydow - Hans Alfredson: 1 degree
John Wayne - Hans Alfredson: Connection not found

Well, it's just for fun, so no biggie if it doesn't work 100%, but if you want my export file for testing, just let me know.

Can you export just these two movies and test if it finds them then?

Which teaches you to don't do important programming at 03:00 am.

New version is up :-)

Quoting GSyren:

Quote:
I am impressed by the speed. Must be pretty efficient code! 

TBH I was pretty suprised by the speed as well. The only thing I did before doing the actual search is building a dictionary of all people involved and then a list of their movies which in turn contains a flat list of their co-stars.

So I start from the left person find all their movies and thus all their co-stars. Then I take the co-stars as new left person and do it all over again without going back to people I've already been to.

This is my dictionary builder. And this is my search engine.

Ok, this is fun.  Thank you.

Quoting DJ Doena:

Quote:
My colleague who wrote his doctoral thesis about graph theory is helping me to write a much more efficient code to find two related nodes (aka actors) and their Bacon number. New version coming out in the next few days. 

Cool! Not that you really need it for this program, but it's always interesting to learn stuff like that.
I'll be sure to take a peek at the code when you're done to see if I understand it. 

I took math some 50+ years ago, but graph theory wasn't on the curriculum. Not sure if this is a case of "you're never to old to learn" or "you can't teach old dogs new tricks". Probably the latter.