🎬 Degrees of Separation

A command-line tool that determines how many "degrees of separation" exist between two actors, based on the movies they’ve co-starred in.

🔍 Description

This program models the famous Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, which posits that any two actors can be connected through six or fewer mutual film roles. Using breadth-first search (BFS), this tool finds the shortest connection path between any two actors via shared movie appearances.

$ 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 Class

📂 Datasets

The program supports two datasets: small and large. Each dataset folder includes the following files:

people.csv: Contains actor information id, name, birth movies.csv: Contains movie information id, title, year stars.csv: Maps actors to the movies they starred in person_id, movie_id

Example

If stars.csv contains:

102,104257

Then Kevin Bacon (ID 102) starred in A Few Good Men (ID 104257), which can be confirmed using the corresponding entries in people.csv and movies.csv.

🧠 How It Works

The program constructs a graph where:

• Nodes represent actors
• Edges represent co-starring in a film

It performs BFS to explore the shortest path between two actors:

• Each level of search expands to all co-stars of the current actor
• Paths are tracked to return the list of actors and movies involved

🚀 Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Python 3.x

Running the Program

$ python degrees.py [dataset]

Example:

$ python degrees.py small

You’ll be prompted to enter two actor names, and the program will return the shortest connection between them.

📁 File Structure

├── degrees.py
├── util.py
├── small/
│   ├── people.csv
│   ├── movies.csv
│   └── stars.csv
├── large/
│   ├── people.csv
│   ├── movies.csv
│   └── stars.csv

✅ Features

• Accurate actor lookup with name disambiguation
• Fast search using breadth-first algorithm
• Scalable to large datasets
• Modular and easy to read codebase

🧪 Example Queries

• Kevin Bacon → Tom Hanks
• Emma Watson → Daniel Radcliffe
• Chris Pratt → Zoe Saldana