Prior art here is the much older Oracle of Bacon project (which I'm hoping the author didn't know about). It uses the full IMDb data set (not just the top 10,000 films) and gets different results, with Eric Roberts in first place and Samuel L. Jackson in fifth: https://oracleofbacon.org/center_list.php

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susiecambria 5 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

RIP Tom Skerritt, #589

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iainmerrick an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm sure I saw a version of this that had Rod Steiger at #1, via a very long career as a mostly supporting actor.

It looks like it's very sensitive to the choice of dataset, so I guess there's no one "correct" answer.

Both this new one and the Oracle of Bacon seem a little suspiciously weighted towards living actors, which makes me think their data is skewed towards modern movies. But Hollywood has been around for a long time, so if there were a correct answer I would have thought it would be likely to be somebody very old or dead.

	▲	ameliaquining an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I don't think that's a problem with the Oracle of Bacon data; I think there actually are more newer movies than older ones, because Hollywood has figured out ways to ramp up its production over time.