Find out how closely related two actors / actresses are by scraping IMDB.
It uses a modified breadth-first search based on a graph of actor / movie nodes that I create on the fly. Well, that's the coolest way I could think of to describe it, but read the code. It's only 100 lines!
If you want to quickly try it out, install Nokogiri (for HTML parsing):
gem install nokogiri
Then, run the quick example I created - how many movies link Ryan Gosling and Steve Carell:
ruby degrees_of_separation.rb
You should get 1. I provided this example because scraping IMDB will take awhile -- for less easily connected actors it will take on the order of a few minutes to run.
Let me know. Pull requests welcome, and if you have a better algorithm feel free to open an issue. Enjoy!