Morse

I had an interesting trip down memory lane the other day when I discovered that the Hallmark TV channel is showing episodes from "Morse", the tv version of one of my favourite fictional detectives. As these programmes were made in the 80s and 90s, I only watched them haphazardly (maybe only when in holiday in Britain), and so I only barely remember them.

The episode which I saw was entitled "Flight of deception", and was written by Anthony Minghella, fan of Van der Graaf Generator, and later to be the director of "The talented Mr Ripley", amongst other films. I'm sad to say that it was fairly forgettable, with only the negative points about it being retained in my memory. Was Morse always so irritable? The programme also featured a laughable cricket match; obviously none of the actors had ever played cricket, because their moves were ludicrous. The 'whodunit' part of the story became fairly clear early on, which took away whatever was left of the story's enjoyment. There was one turn in the plot which completely surprised me, but that's all. One actor* in the episode, whose name I didn't catch, played a baddie; a few years later he too was to play the part of a tv police inspector (whose name also escapes my memory).

I see that there are episodes from various seasons being shown during the week (some of which are repeats), so it will be interesting to see whether I fell on a poor example of the series or a representative. Of course, it may well be that my viewing perspective has changed in the twenty years since these programmes were made.

The Morse books were something else. Whilst certain aspects were very good, there were other aspects which became very annoying (mainly attributes of the author, having little to do with the story). At times there was a very patronising tone which became too much at time. Maybe just as well that the author caused his eponymous detective to die, because I'm not too sure that I would have continued buying the books. As there are 33 television episodes compared to 11 books, it is obvious that failures in the screen version can't be blamed on the books.

[Edit from 14 years later: * Nathaniel Parker] 

Bacon numbers (3)

A correction to my original post on the subject: my program uses a breadth-first search algorithm. Prolog uses by default the depth-first search algorithm, along with backtracking, which can be simulated in Pascal using recursion (and indeed, the example which I quoted of trying to calculate which bills a customer has paid uses recursion).

Breadth-first uses an explicit list, instead of implicit stacks. Delphi's TStringList type serves this purpose admirably.

I added an extra twist to the final output: instead of simply listing the steps between actors, the connecting films are also named.

No more on this subject.

Bacon numbers (2)

I wrote before about matching Warren Beatty with Diane Keaton. If I ask the program to work that way, it can't find a match, but if I ask it to match Diane with Warren, a change which theoretically shouldn't make any difference, then it immediately answers with '2' (via Shelley Duvall). Hmmm. Why does this happen? Should I use heuristics? Maybe the second person should be the one who has fewer movies in my collection. Update: a quick debugging run with logging reveals the mistake. I had the wrong termination condition - the program should finish when there is a match or the list of candidates is empty. After changing the program slightly, it now finds the distance between Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton; slowly in one direction, quickly in the other.

Bacon numbers

I see that I've managed to pass an entire month without blogging. There have been experiences which have been too delicate to share here, and other experiences which aren't very interesting (mainly health issues).

There is some new (to me) music which has been floating around. An advance copy of Randy Newman's new cd, "Harps and Angels", his first of original songs since 1999's "Bad Love" has been played several times, but has not been received here as well as some of his earlier material. To my ears, it contains too much 12 bar blues based material, and that's not a musical form which I care for.

I've also been belatedly listening to British soul singer Corinne Bailey Rae's eponymous record. I'd seen some of her videos on VH-1 and hadn't been overly impressed. At the time, I didn't know that she was British. Her name came up whilst reading a detective novel, in which she was described as coming from Leeds; I checked this out and found it to be true. I then heard a song of hers on the radio which I very much liked, so I thought that it was time that I listened to her properly. Unfortunately, the song which I liked isn't on the record, which makes me wonder whether it was really her. Every time I've tried searching for certain key lyrics in the song (I'm sure that she sang about "chasing paper"), I've found myriad references to The Beatles' "Two of us", and none to CBR. The disc itself has worn out its welcome; it's not a keeper.

Over the past few months, I've been recording films from television onto DVD. After a while, I found myself recording the same film more than once, and so thought that it was time that I organise these discs. For someone like myself, writing such a database program would be simple and fun. At first, it started off with a table of actors (name only), a table of films (name only) and a table of cast lists, in which the actors were matched to the films, but after a while, my ambitions grew.

First off was a list of directors, although it turns out that apart from Woody Allen and Robert Altman, there are very few directors who have more than a sample showing in my collection. Then I added a link to the imdb site; clicking on a button would bring up a web browser pointing to the appropriate page. Then of course there were all kinds of reports about actors: how many times each actor has appeared in the films which I have, with which other actors they have worked and with which directors they have appeared. Simple, harmless fun.

Today I got up and thought to myself, "Bacon numbers". This wouldn't necessarily have to start with Kevin Bacon (who only appears in a few of the films which I have); rather, I could check connections between any two actors. Obviously the act of someone who has too much time on his hands. When I told this to my wife, she started laughing, as I expected her to do.

But from a programming point of view, this is a very interesting exercise. The algorithm needed, basically, is the same algorithm which is fundamental to the Prolog language, a language which has always intrigued and inspired me. I've written a few such programs (one was for accounting purposes: a customer has twenty bills outstanding and makes a payment without saying what it was for; the program tries various combinations of bills until it gets to the same total), but this one was a bit different.

Here's the algorithm:

1. Add to the list the id of the actor whose Bacon number we are trying to calculate

2. Remove the first name from the list and store it in a variable

3. If the target actor (eg Kevin Bacon as per the original) and this actor have appeared together in a play, then print the distance, and set a finishing flag

4. If they haven't appeared together, then get all the actors who have appeared with this actor and add them to the list, increasing the distance

5. If the query in stage 4 returns no answers, then finish, otherwise

6. Go to stage 2.

The actual implementation was much easier than I expected. I had to add a flag to each actor to show whether s/he had been inspected during the current search, but apart from this, I was able to implement the algorithm using two database queries and a listbox.

I've checked various combinations of people and have got back the expected results. For example, I don't have a film in which Meg Ryan and Gary Sinise have appeared together (maybe there isn't one at all). Their mutual Bacon number is 2, via Tom Hanks (MR and TH have appeared in two films which I have together, and TH and GS have appeared in one). For Woody Allen and Sandra Bullock, the number is 3 at the moment (WA -> Diane Keaton -> Keanu Reeves -> Sandra Bullock). Eventually the program will surprise me and return a smaller number than the one I am expecting.

The only real problem with this program is that it uses the Prolog convention of a closed universe. I was checking Warren Beatty with Diane Keaton; I know that they appeared together in "Reds", so their number is 1. But I don't have this film in my library, and so the program couldn't find any link. The only WB film which I have is "McCabe and Mrs Miller", and the actors there don't seem to connect.... Wait a minute! Shelley Duvall was in M&MM with WB, and she was in "Annie Hall" with Diane Keaton. Maybe I didn't add her name to those films....