Erdos-Bacon Number ================== Let us define the following numbers: "Erdős number" is the degrees of separation from mathematician Paul Erdős (1913–1996), as measured by joint authorship of papers. In other words, Paul Erdős himself has Erdős number 0. Erdős' co-authors have Erdős number 1, obviously a closed list which you can retrieve from the Erdős Number Project [1]. The co-authors of these people have Erdős number 2. The co-authors of Erdős-2 authors have upper bound 3 for their Erdős number, since they might co-author with an Erdős-1 author in the future. And so on, recursively. What makes Paul Erdős a good rank-0 for this definition is that he has co-authored articles with a large and diverse set of people. Similarly, "Bacon number" is the degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon as measured by being credited as actors in the same film. Like Erdős, Bacon has starred in many films from different genres which makes him a good base for rank-0. Finally, "Erdős-Bacon number" is the sum of the two. There is a small number of people who have a finite Erdős-Bacon number, the relevant Wikipedia page lists some [2]. One very interesting example, at least from a KR point of view, is Natalie Portman who has an Erdős-Bacon number of at most 7: Sarah Michelle Gellar has Bacon number 1, "The Air I Breathe", 2007. Natalie Portman has Bacon number at most 2, A Powerful Noise Live, 2009 Joseph Gillis has Erdős number 1, [1] Jonathan Victor has Erdős number 2, doi:10.1137/0513062 Michael Gazzaniga has Erdős number at most 3 [3] Abigail Baird has at most 4, doi:10.1162/0898929053467569 Natalie Hershlag has at most 5, doi:10.1006/nimg.2002.1170 Natalie Portman and Natalie Hershlag are the same person. The exercise is to: (a) Import bibliography and filmography dumps into a knowledge graph. Write some common-sense knowledge that will allow an inference engine to decide if two entities from different databases might refer to the same person or cannot possibly refer to the same person. (b) Use this KG to find persons with finite Erdős-Bacon number. Validate the axioms you have authored: Are the Wikipedia examples retrieved? If not, why not? Are further persons discovered by your system correctly identified as having finite Erdős-Bacon number? Note that the point is not that you retrieve everybody, but that you correctly identify what worked and what didn't and why. (c) Bonus question: Use GenAI to generate the properties of a hypothetical movie (title, genre, director, partial cast) or article (title, journal, authors) that would reduce the Erdős-Bacon number upper bound for somebody with a finite Erdős-Bacon number. Validate that the movie or article is consistent with the KG and argue whether it is realistic or not. References [1] https://sites.google.com/oakland.edu/grossman/home/the-erdoes-number-project [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdős–Bacon_number [3] https://nyuscholars.nyu.edu/en/publications/acquired-central-dyschromatopsia-analysis-of-a-case-with-preserva