Company
Date Published
Author
Joe Depeau
Word count
1003
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

I'm a nostalgic child of the '80s who fondly remembers reading Choose Your Own Adventure books. Recently, I loaded one of these books into Neo4j Desktop to visualize its narrative structure as a graph. The author mapped out the story by creating nodes for pages and relationships between them to represent choices. Using this graph model, I was able to answer various questions about the book's structure, such as finding loops or unreachable pages. The graph also allowed me to query the shortest path to an ending page or the longest path from the start. This exercise has shown how graph databases like Neo4j can be used for pathfinding use cases, and I envision their potential applications in analyzing authorial intent or tracking narrative complexity.