Ordering movie credits with graph theory
Not being a movie buff, I really did not understand the basics of what the goal is here. (There was a problem statement, but it really didn't give the 50,000 foot view.) After having read much of the article, I think I can summarize it.(1) Whose name comes up first when the credits roll matters in some way. Presumably people feel slighted if they don't have the right amount of prominence or something like that.(2) Apparently, despite this being important enough to worry about, and even though there are standardized titles, and even though people have been making movies for well over 100 years, there isn't a consensus or standardized order. Seemingly every film just sort of does something they feel is appropriate.(3) It must be a fair assumption that people who arrange credits do it with purpose, so that if you look at the order they chose, it tells you something meaningful about what the right order is.(4) The goal, then, is to basically computationally reverse engineer what order people have in mind when they put credits on film and produce an ordering that reflects actual practice as accurately as possible.(5) This is a messy process because the data is inconsistent and contradictory, so it is fertile ground for creatively applying algorithms to tease out the meaningful parts.