Mathematicians built a map of connections in the Star Wars universe

Visualization of the links between 7563 main characters in the Star Wars universe

Using new software, researchers from EPFL analyzed the Star Wars universe, building a map of the connections between characters, worlds, and civilizations. In total, about 20 thousand characters and 640 communities were involved within a time span of 36 thousand years.

The basis of the software used is the theory of graphs , with the help of which scientists have analyzed hundreds of web pages on Star Wars. This work is a demonstration of the capabilities of the new software. It can be used, of course, not only for working with literary works and films. But since the authors of the study are fans of the Star Wars world, the first serious work was done based on them.

Moreover, the subject of study is ideal - the “War” universe is simply huge. In addition to 7 different films of the series, the plot is complemented by a variety of books and video games that expand the saga and complement the episodes. The study was performed using the Signal Processing Laboratory 2 (LTS2) tool under the supervision of Prof. Vandergheynst.
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As mentioned above, the study involved 20 thousand characters. The 7500 are important for the Star Wars world events. There are 1,367 Jedi and 724 Sith. Heroes are divided into 640 different communities on 294 planets. An analysis of the 10 largest communities showed an interesting result - as it turned out, 80% of the population of a “far-distant” galaxy are humans.

In addition to counting the number of characters and identifying their affiliation to a particular community, the program also divided everything according to a temporary basis. The time span of 36 thousand years was divided into 6 main periods: before the Republic, the Old Republic, the Empire, the Uprising, the New Republic, the Jedi Order.


Different colors show different eras. Black color - missing values. Red is the era of the Empire (episodes 1, 2, 3). Blue - uprising (episodes 4, 5, 6), green - both eras. The second figure shows the same connections, after analyzing the connections of objects. The black color was replaced with blue, as a result of using information about the connections of neighbors.

“In order to somehow streamline this array of data, we conducted an analysis, studied all the connections of each character. Using the links between the individual elements, we were able to almost unmistakably identify to which era someone belongs, even if this information was not indicated in books or films, ”says Javier Bresson, a member of the LTS2 research team.

According to the developers, their software is capable of streamlining and structuring vast amounts of data, extracting and analyzing digital data. LTS2 does what no man can do. In this case, the system allows you to select individual elements of the data set, identify them, restoring the missing links and information. And all this in a very short period of time. In detail about the work the team tells in his blog: part 1 and part 2 .