Inspired by XKCD:903, Wikipedia steps to philosophy • Hacker News Board

orblivion wrote: post #29

It totally worked for me, I tried it with Sausage and Cradle of Filth. I thought it was a joke, it blew me away. But then I found that "Osama Bin Laden" crossed "philosophers" and then ended on a loop between "reason" and "rationality". EDIT: I just tried "Osama Bin Laden", the steps it takes seems to be using a slightly different Wikipedia than I see.

I tried OOP, eventually arriving at Philosophy -- OMG, it works :))

Re: Inspired by XKCD:903, Wikipedia steps to philosophy

#36

Post by mtodd » Thu, May 26, 2011, 1:46 PM UTC

Bastard beat me to it!

Friend of mine was graphing out all of the connections (using Graphviz) and found some interesting patterns. Ultimately you can say the same thing for "Science", "Knowledge", and even "Mathematics".

Re: Inspired by XKCD:903, Wikipedia steps to philosophy

#37

Post by chrislloyd » Thu, May 26, 2011, 1:46 PM UTC

A few years ago at Railscamp in Australia, Andrew Grimm proved this exact outcome. His code is here: https://github.com/agrimm/philosophy-dump-parser and https://github.com/agrimm/philosophy-navigation.

Re: Inspired by XKCD:903, Wikipedia steps to philosophy

#38

Post by albertsun » Thu, May 26, 2011, 1:48 PM UTC

I tried it with Iraq, but the page parsing is slightly wrong. Got this result.

Iraq Arabic_language Languages Human Precambrian Eon_(geology) Chronology Time Measurement Magnitude_(mathematics) Property_(philosophy) Modern_philosophy Philosophy 12 steps to philosophy

But the link to Arabic is in parentheses. The first non-parenthesesed link is to Western Asia.

Re: Inspired by XKCD:903, Wikipedia steps to philosophy

#39

Post by shadowpwner » Thu, May 26, 2011, 1:53 PM UTC

iopuy wrote: post #15

camtarn wrote: post #5

Hah. The hypothesis is false, but the script already has that covered via loop detection... nice :) panhard Auverland Panhard uh oh... found a loop panhard -> auverland -> panhard. So far the longest trail I've found, at 25 steps, was from 'ED209' via pottery, through minerals, states of matter, knowledge, finite sets, mathematics... that's one heck of a wikitrail. [edit] Scratch that, 'Horst link' is longer via one…

30 for "Howard Hughes" uh oh... found a loop mathematics -> quantity -> property_(philosophy) -> modern_philosophy -> western_europe -> europe -> continent -> landmass -> landform -> earth_sciences -> science -> knowledge -> fact -> information -> finite_set -> mathematics.

Its supposed to stop at philosophy..

Re: Inspired by XKCD:903, Wikipedia steps to philosophy

#40

Post by malvim » Thu, May 26, 2011, 1:55 PM UTC

Fargren wrote: post #26

You don't reach Philosophy from Philosophy.

Hey, I did!

Did it using the software and then checked wikipedia by hand:

Philosophy -> Existence -> Sense -> Organism -> Biology -> Natural_science -> Science -> Knowledge -> Fact -> Information -> Finite_set -> Mathematics -> Quantity -> Property_(philosophy) -> Modern_philosophy -> Philosophy

15 steps to philosophy