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

Setting up an accumulator and using the convert to BFS function

After our boilerplate lines, we're going to define two character IDs that we're interested in. We'll say we're interested in the degrees of separation from Spider-Man, who turns out to be character ID 5306. What we're interested in finding out is how many degrees of separation Adam 3031, whoever that is, is from Spider-Man:

# The characters we wish to find the degree of separation between: 
startCharacterID = 5306 #SpiderMan 
targetCharacterID = 14 #ADAM 3,031 (who?) 

I intentionally picked some random character who I'd never heard of because it will be a little more interesting if it takes a few iterations to get a result.

We talked about using an accumulator to signal to the ...