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Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

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Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#171

Post by larkeith »

endorphone wrote: post #73
kyleschiller wrote: post #30

What determines a "path"? "Philosophy" is connected to "Ethiopia" through "Sexism", but I couldn't find that phrase on either page. https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Philosophy&tar...

Sexism links to both philosophy and Ethiopia. It is treating links as an undirected graph (despite the visual indication showing a directional vector), which seems entirely fair.

This is incorrect; links are considered a directed graph, as can be seen by reversing the start and end points of most paths.

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#172

Post by larkeith »

the_af wrote: post #81
endorphone wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sexism links to both philosophy and Ethiopia. It is treating links as an undirected graph (despite the visual indication showing a directional vector), which seems entirely fair.

It seems somewhat unfair. If it's not a directed graph, it means you can't actually navigate from the source to the target page by following these links... edit: in fact, the author describes the goal of his project in another comment here: "my goal for the project which is to traverse the links as any human would be able to".

Parent was incorrect - the graphs are directed.

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#173

Post by justinlilly »

jwngr wrote: post #13

Creator here. Six Degrees of Wikipedia is a side project I've been sporadically hacking on over the past few years. It was an interesting technical challenge and it's fun to play with the end result. Here's the tech stack: * Frontend: React (Create React App) * Backend: Python Flask * Database: SQLite * Web (frontend) hosting: Firebase Hosting * Server (backend) hosting: Google Compute Engine (it runs fine on a tiny…

I've poked at trying to build this multiple times for the last 10 years, but always ended up looking at the wikipedia XML and just balking.

The one difference that mine theoretically would have had is that I think it would be rad to include the paragraph you found the link along the edge in the graph, so you could see a little story.

Also, excluding years and places to make the routes more "interesting" (e.g. longest path under a limit without cycles).

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#174

Post by freefal »

cortesoft wrote: post #84
colemannugent wrote: post #16

This makes the "How many clicks to Hitler" game much faster. For those uninitiated, the game was to click the "Random Article" link in the sidebar and count how many links it took to get to Hitler. It is really interesting to see just how big of an event WWII was. Every country article has a section on their involvement or why they were not involved. After playing with it more, this is pretty fun. I vote that a "degr…

This reminds me of the wikipedia rule I learned a while back: If you click the first link in an article (besides the pronunciation guide), you will always end up on philosophy.

Woah. This works. Neat.

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#175

Post by jffry »

cortesoft wrote: post #84
colemannugent wrote: post #16

This makes the "How many clicks to Hitler" game much faster. For those uninitiated, the game was to click the "Random Article" link in the sidebar and count how many links it took to get to Hitler. It is really interesting to see just how big of an event WWII was. Every country article has a section on their involvement or why they were not involved. After playing with it more, this is pretty fun. I vote that a "degr…

This reminds me of the wikipedia rule I learned a while back: If you click the first link in an article (besides the pronunciation guide), you will always end up on philosophy.

There's even a great page with a small graph and a rundown of some more resources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Getting_to_Philosoph...

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#176

Post by larkeith »

apeace wrote: post #168

Did I find a bug? https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Adolf%20Hitler... It's showing "Bill Gates" and "Mark Zuckerberg" as the hops, but on the start page I don't see links to those. (Apologies for the subject matter. It was the first thing I thought of, because of a Wikipedia-path-finding game I had heard of before.)

It uses a pre-downloaded database of links [1], so presumably certain pages that were once linked have been updated.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16469427

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#178

Post by purell_hack »

After spending way too much time I got 9 degrees of separation. I did piggyback off of someone else's work with "Phinney". https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Lion%20Express...

I found a ton of 5 degree paths and only a couple of 6 degree ones. Then I pulled out the "big guns" (the dead-end pages category). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Dead-end_pages_from_F...

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#179

Post by sinaa »

vorpalhex wrote: post #154
jwngr wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! I'm glad you asked. I actually do what I call a bi-directional breadth first search[1]. The gist of it is that instead of just doing a BFS from the source node until I reach the target node, I do a reverse BFS from the target node as well and wait until the two searches overlap. That helps with the exploding path problem, although that still becomes an issue for longer paths (>= 5 degrees generally). I also p…

When I was first playing with this, I actually really expected you to be using an expensive performant solution like neo4j. When I read that you were using sqlite, I didn't believe it at first and thought it was a mistype from dev until I looked over the source. That's an impressive and well thought out performance enhancement, and that the app runs so blazingly fast on sqlite is very impressive.

My thoughts exactly. It's impressive that despite relying on BFS, the tool manages to be so fast on a tiny node on google cloud. Even when there's a depth of >= 5 !

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#180

Post by purell_hack »

el_benhameen wrote: post #52
empath75 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to go more obscure -- Fiber Bundle to Lars Ulrich was 4 steps. Calabi-Yau Manifold to Donnie Wahlberg is also 4. I haven't gotten 5 yet.

I got 9 steps with "Here (company)" to "There (wikipedia disambiguation page)".

I got a 9 step one without a disambiguation page. https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Lion%20Express... Took a long time though.
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