Many have heard of the popular game called “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” which is the idea that Kevin Bacon can be linked with any other actor in the world via movie appearances. Jack Nicholson was in "A Few Good Men" with Kevin Bacon. Michelle Pfeiffer was in "Wolf" with Jack Nicholson, who was in "A Few Good Men" with Kevin Bacon. The number of links is the “Bacon Number”, which can not be greater than six – Bacon (Nicholson) = 1, Bacon (Pfeiffer) = 2 and Bacon (Lugosi) = 3.

By using sample data from IMDB.com, IMDB Analyzer shows how quickly and easily the Cogito Graph Engine can find not only the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” but the “Six Degrees of All Things Movies.”

For more information on how a graph can do six degrees of Kevin Bacon, read Joe Celko's article "Discovering Relationships in Context: Inductive tools for forensic computing", Dr. Dobb's Portal: The World of Software Development, June 30, 2006.

Figure 1: IMDBAnalyzer home page shown above is found at www.IMDBAnalyzer.com.

Figure 2: The IMDBAnalyzer Search Page allows you to search for relationships between any movie entities such as person, movie or location. This is not limited to just two items and is not limited to just movies and actors. IMDBAnalyzer allows three entities to be related but the Graph Engine under the covers has no limits. In this example, we are searching to see how Kevin Bacon is related to John Wayne.

Figure 3: Within Seconds the Results page shows that there are 42 relationships between Kevin and John at four steps (or degrees) and eight at six steps or degrees. This results page shows four of the relationships at a time.

Figure 4: Clicking on “discover” for the first path listed in the results page allows users to move to a discovery screen where they can arbitrarily walk the “graph” or relationship tree to discover other non-obvious relationships.

Figure 5: By exercising the discovery option you can see how the unique graph format allows a user to walk the tree and discover other unknown relationships.

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