Frank Kane's Taming Big Data with Apache Spark and Python

Superhero degrees of separation - introducing the breadth-first search algorithm

You might have heard how everyone is connected through six degrees of separation. Somebody you know knows somebody else who knows somebody else and so on; eventually, you can be connected to pretty much everyone on the planet. Or maybe you've heard about how Kevin Bacon is within a few degrees of separation of pretty much everybody in Hollywood. Well, I used to work at imdb.com, and I can tell you that is true, Kevin Bacon is pretty well connected, but a lot of other actors are too. Kevin Bacon is actually not the most connected actor, but I digress! We want to bring this concept of degrees of separation to our superhero dataset, where we have this virtual social ...