Six Degrees of Kevin's Bacon

Basically, my main argument is that something like this could be used for Amazon-style product recommendations. My idea is to do a kind of "degrees of separation" kind of thing, where each row of the spreadsheet represents connections between three flavors. I will manually correct for variations in spelling ("salt" vs "salty" or "chocloate" vs "chocolate") but not for differences in word choice, nor will I attempt to filter out jokes. The idea is to do something like Amazon's product recommendations: given a flavor X, list all the flavors Y degrees of separation away so that people can see what else they are likely to enjoy, ordered by the popularity of those flavors. For example, if a person buys steak, this recommendation engine would then recommend that they also try buffalo, Sriracha, chocolate, butter, and alfredo; it would not recommend raspberry or coffee (assuming only 1 degree of separation) because those are linked with "sirloin steak", a different flavor. Jokes such as "mothballs" would be low on the recommendation list because of their lack of popularity. I might also introduce links between different types of things, such as between "dark chocolate", "white chocolate", and "chocolate", so that a person who likes white chocolate would see the other two as being one degree of separation away. If a flavor is mentioned more than once, then its distance from the original flavor X will be the smallest of its distances (i.e. if somebody likes X and Y, somebody else likes X and Z, and a third person likes Y and Z, then Y would be one degree of separation from X rather than two) Possible visualizations include a tree graph whose nodes are the different flavors, with the root node being either the most popular flavor or a chosen flavor X (see the example above). Each level of the tree would be one more degree of separation away from the root flavor. Chocolate White chocolate Dark chocolate Salty Strawberry Wood Coffee Curry Seared edge of steak Raspberry No separation 1 degree 2 degrees

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