RCOMM 2011 Challenge 1: Hobbit Genealogy

This is a solution for Challenge 1 of the a live data mining process design competition "Who Wants to be a Data Miner" held at RCOMM 2011 in Dublin.

As you certainly know, Balbo Baggins is the common ancestor of Balbo and Frodo Baggins. The file opened by the operator "Open Ancestor" contains a table with details about parentship in the Baggins family (insert a breakpoint after read CSV). Each example contains a parent and a child. Of course, the same parent can be contained multiple times in the data set. The task of Challenge 1 was to find all descendants (and their their respective levels) from Balbo.

This solution achieves this goal by starting with an example set with a single row (Balbo) and joining the parentship table. This yields all children of Balbo. Repeating this, all grandchildren are found. The process uses a loop to iterate down to level 6 (which is empty because no more information is provided for this level). Bilbo and Frodo are found on Levels 3 and 4, respectively.