audioscrobbler experiments

<< other nerdy projects

1. bands like the bands i like
2. the shortest path from celine dion to napalm death
3. multi dimensional tag distance

2. the shortest path from celine dion to napalm death

idea

here's another idea following on from my last audioscrobbler experiment

recall the similiarity data provided gives, for a particular artist, other artists that are similiar with a match level

by following the similiarity links from artist to artist we should be able to make a connection between any two artists...

implementation

i've written a ruby version of dijkstra's shortest path algorithm to try and find the shortest similiarity path between two artists
(graphs generated by graph viz and here are the .dot files for the graphs on this page)

examples

eg1 nofx to bad religion

lets consider a simpler example of the relationship between two similiar southern californian punk bands; nofx and bad religion

here's the derived search graph; lower numbers denote a higher degree of similiarity

we started at nofx, tried lagwagon then no use for a name,
it got too expensive to leave NUFAN so we switched back to rancid, operation ivy and tim armstrong
after giving that line up tried pennywise and then finally bad religion

interesting side note!

an interesting artefact of the data (and how i choose to interpret it ) is that looking at the nofx data there is actually a relationship directly from nofx to bad religion!
however it's cost, though a direct route, is more expensive than going via pennywise.
i choose to use the total cost only and discard the number of nodes hopped

eg2 nofx to frenzal rhomb

lets try a bit of a longer hop, nofx to australian punk legends frenzal rhomb

not that much longer in terms of the number of nodes but the relationship between NUFAN and frenzal rhomb is quite weak

how many nodes were searched in this instance? quite a few more as we can see below! that hop from NUFAN to frenzal was costly!

(here's the full size version)

it's obvious that the depth of searching should be taken into account to some degree though;
according to this graph nofx is more like grind core masters extreme noise terror (8 nodes apart with similiarity distance of 63.73)
than frenzal rhomb (3 nodes apart but similiarity distance of 65.53)!

eg3 celion dion to napalm death

lets go nuts. can we get a link between celion dion and napalm death??

yep! as you can see from the left hand side! it took awhile but the link is there! it has to check 600+ artsits to find it but it's there

since similiarities are not bidirectional the path back from napalm death to celion dion takes many more hops, 4,500+

here's a graph of both directions combined, it's interesting so little of the path is shared both ways

june 15-19, 2008