Chris Volinsky, of AT&T Research, put up a nice application that plays Six Degrees of Separation online with “proximity networks,” his social-network derived notion of distance, a fast interface, and a decent visualization.
You might want to connect Breck Baldwin and Willard von Orman Quine; Breck’s the president and founder of Alias-i, whereas W.V.O. Quine is one of the greatest 20th Century philosophers of language. More fun can be had by connecting Bob Carpenter and Hal Daume III; I (Bob) am the software/machine learning guy at Alias-i and Hal’s the author of the NLPers Blog.
Here’s Volinsky’s description of the application and here’s the top-level start page.
If you’d like to try something more mainstream, you can also connect Hollywood actors to one another. Dustin Hoffman’s a long way from Katherine Hepburn.
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