What is a
Hinton number?

The Erdős number, rebuilt for the deep-learning era. Paul Erdős wrote 1,500+ papers; mathematicians measure their distance to him in co-authorship hops. We do the same with Geoffrey E. Hinton as the origin: co-author a paper with Hinton and your number is 1; co-author with a 1 and yours is 2 — the length of the shortest co-authorship path.

1. 01Parse every paper in DBLP; two people share an edge if they co-authored at least one paper. Papers with more than 25 authors are excluded from the graph — a 300-author consortium paper is not a handshake.
2. 02Run one breadth-first search from Hinton's node over all 31.8M edges. Every author gets a distance and a parent pointer — that pointer chain is the shortest path shown on your page.
3. 03Count the distinct shortest paths of that length (the "via N paths" line) and your percentile among all ~3.9M connected authors. The most common distance is 4 — 54% of connected authors sit there.

Hop count treats a one-off workshop paper the same as a decade of collaboration. Link strength doesn't. We use the standard co-authorship tie strength from network science — Newman's collaboration weight (M. E. J. Newman, 2001) — where each shared paper adds 1 / (co-authors − 1) to an edge: many small-team papers make a strong edge; one 25-author paper adds almost nothing. We then find your strongest route to Hinton (it may take more hops than the shortest one — that's your real research lineage) and report where that strength ranks, as a percentile. Strength is total link weight, not hop count — a long chain of heavy collaborations can outrank a short chain of thin ones. The ten-box meter on your badge is that percentile in 10-point steps.