Identity cycles

One of the things I find most interesting in WorldCat Identities is looking at the related names and their Identity pages.  The other night I as I was clicking through some of them I wondered what the longest cycle would be if you just kept clicking on the first related name.  A little code and a bunch of cpu time later, the answer (this week at least) seems to be 5:

Atiliano Sánchez→ Marcos Brizuela → Francisco Gómez del Palacio → Miguel G Careaga → Basilisa de la Calera → Atiliano Sánchez

Actually I was hoping for some better known names.  There are lots of other ways the game could be played, but maybe that is best left as an exercise for the reader.

--Th

Comments

[Dave]

How are the related names ranked? If there's a quantitative measure of relatedness, could that be put in the XML?

Here's another game, to try to walk from high & low culture: start with someone with a high audience level, and move to the first related name with a lower audience level. Repeat until you can go no further.

Response:
Each of the related names (<associatedNames> in the XML) has a count in the <name> field. The count is the number of records both names are found. Unfortunately there was a bug in the extraction program, so the counts were meaningless. This will be fixed the next time we reload the database (possibly next week).
--Th