Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon

Based on the Six Degrees of Separation idea that all actors in Hollywood are six or fewer movies away from the actor Kevin Bacon. It is inspired by The Oracle of Bacon.

Compile and Run Instructions

make all type=opt

This will generate two programs - actorconnections and pathfinder.
The actorconnections program answers the question: "After which year did actors X and Y become connected?"
The pathfinder program computes the shortest path between 2 actors (weighted/unweighted where weight is how old the movie is from 2015; newer movies have lesser weight, i.e. higher priority). Weighted traversal uses Dijkstra's (greedy) algorithm whereas the unweighted traversal uses BFS (Breadth First Search) algorithm.
Omit type=opt when compiling for debugging purposes.
To clean executables, type make clean.

./actorconnections movie_casts_file test_pairs_file out_file bfs/ufind

For example,

./actorconnections movie_casts.tsv test_pairs.tsv out_a.txt bfs

The last argument dictates which traversal algorithm to be used: bfs-BFS or ufind-Union Find.

./pathfinder movie_casts_file u/w test_pairs_file out_file

For example,

./pathfinder movie_casts.tsv w test_pairs.tsv out_p.txt

The third argument decides which type of path traversal is performed: u-Unweighted (BFS) or w-Weigted (Dijkstra's).