Every social network research paper says roughly the same thing: most humans are separated by a surprisingly small number of hops. Enter a name, pick who you want to connect to, and watch the path build.
"X Degrees of Y" riffs on the old parlor game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, and on the broader "small world" idea from social network research: pick any two people on Earth, and the chain of acquaintances connecting them is usually shorter than you'd expect — often just a handful of hops.
The tool originally started life as "Six Degrees of Epstein," but that framing implied something the project was never meant to say. A short path to anyone, including someone who did terrible things, is not evidence of wrongdoing — it's just what happens in a densely connected world of 8 billion people. Renaming it "X Degrees of Y" lets you connect to anyone: a pop star, a president, your old boss, or a cautionary figure like Epstein — and treats all of those the same way, mathematically.
This build has no server, no crawler, and no access to real biographical or social data. The chain of "connectors" you see is produced by a deterministic generator seeded from the two names you enter — same two names always produce the same path, but the intermediate people, relationships, and hop count are placeholders, not research findings.
A real version of this idea would need licensed, verifiable data (public records, reputable reporting, opt-in social graphs) and a lot of editorial care about sourcing — especially before labeling anyone's relationship to a person like Epstein.
When Y is a figure with a documented criminal circle, the visualization can mark a boundary: hops that represent a reported, verified association with that circle, versus hops that are purely incidental (same school, same city, mutual acquaintance) and carry no implication of wrongdoing. In this demo, that boundary is placed randomly for illustration — in a real deployment it would need to be backed by citations, not guesswork.
Everything runs client-side in your browser. The names you type are never sent anywhere, logged, or stored — there's no backend to send them to.
This is a concept prototype. If you're extending it into something real, please build in real sourcing, a correction/appeals path, and a strong bias toward "incidental" over "flagged" when evidence is thin.