The last boy left walking receives a large sum of money and a “prize” of his choice.Ī long walk – or more specifically, a long hike – also features in Wild by Cheryl Strayed. If they fall below a pace of four miles per hour, they receive three warnings and are subsequently shot by a group of soldiers.

Written in 1979 under the pseudonym Richard Bachman the book is set in a dystopian America, where a major source of entertainment is the Long Walk, in which one hundred teenage boys walk without rest. Takami’s depiction of a totalitarian fascist government was heavily influenced by his favourite Stephen King novel, The Long Walk. As part of a ruthless authoritarian program, they are provided arms and forced to kill one another until only one survivor is left standing. In the dystopian novel, a random class of junior high school students are selected and taken to a deserted island. The shocking consequence of being selected in the lottery is revealed only at the end, but let’s just say that it is not necessarily a prize that you would want to win!Īnother lottery of chance with devastating consequences features in the Japanese classic Battle Royale by Koushun Takami. The story describes a fictional small town which observes an annual rite known as “the lottery”, in which a member of the community is selected by chance. However, over 600 had no paths to him at all.This month’s Six Degrees starts with the frankly quite terrifying short story The Lottery by Shirley Jackson.

Out of over 54,000 actors, nearly everyone was under seven degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon–so the theory’s pretty spot-on. So, is the Bacon theory really true? I iterated through all the actors in the dataset and calculated their paths. Line2D(,, marker='o', markerfacecolor='r', markersize=10, color='w', label='The Man Himself')]Īx.legend(handles=custom_legend, loc='lower right')Īnd now the network graph: A little clunky, but you get the gist The lingering question Line2D(,, marker='o', markerfacecolor='b', markersize=10, color='w', label='Movie'), Nx.draw_networkx(G_chart, pos, node_color=color_map, alpha=0.5, labels=labels, with_labels=True, ax=ax)Ĭustom_legend =, , marker='o', markerfacecolor='g', markersize=10, color='w', label='Actor'), Pos = nx.spring_layout(G_chart, scale=0.25)Ĭolor_map = for n in G_chart.nodes(data=True)] # networkx layouts can be really tricky: something you just have to play with G_chart.add_node(original_node, original_node) # add node and its data payload to the graph i'll use in my chart

Nodes_in_path = nx.shortest_path(G, source=a, target='Kevin Bacon') # populate the new graph with the random actors and their paths to Kevin Bacon G_chart = nx.Graph() # a new graph I spin up just for charting purposes

What are the six degrees of separation