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Inspired by XKCD:903, Wikipedia steps to philosophy

ryanelmquist.com

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

#81
As of 2008, the center of English Wikipedia is the article 2007. From that article, it takes on average 3.45 clicks to get to any of the 2,111,479 articles reachable from it. Disregarding all of the articles that are just lists, years or days of the year, the "real article" closest to the center is United Kingdom, at an average of 3.45 clicks to anywhere else.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation#Wikip...

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

#83

I just spent about 20 minutes trying to get anything more than 20. Wikipedia has the answer, as to not spoil here's a link. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Get_to_Philosophy#Cha... I like the last loop on the article not crossed out.

Wikipedia:Get_to_Philosophy is not what xkcd is describing, though. That page seems to allow any link to be chosen. xkcd says, "click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics".

For example, Wikipedia:_Get_to_Philosophy provides the example, Optimum "L" filter -> Butterworth filter. But the first link in 'Optimum "L" filter' is "Athanasios Papoulis".

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

#84
post #15
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.

Hmm. I just tried "Howard Hughes" and got only 15 steps.

Business_magnate -> Philanthropy -> Ancient_Greece -> History_of_Greece -> Greeks -> Nation -> Sovereign_state -> -> State_(polity) -> Social_sciences -> Field_of_study -> Academia -> Community -> Interacting -> Action_(philosophy) -> Philosophy

Has the script been tweaked already?

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

#85

I just spent about 20 minutes trying to get anything more than 20. Wikipedia has the answer, as to not spoil here's a link. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Get_to_Philosophy#Cha... I like the last loop on the article not crossed out.

Same here. I finally got it with the word "Coprophagia". 21 steps. I feel oddly proud.

(It came from a conversation some friends and I had about kopi luwak, just to explain why I tried this obscure word).

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

#86
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…

Heh. "Philosophy":

uh oh... found a loop

philosophy -> existence -> sense -> organism -> biology -> natural_science -> science -> knowledge -> fact -> information -> sequence -> mathematics -> quantity -> property_(philosophy) -> modern_philosophy -> philosophy.

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

#87
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

found another loop, on my first try nonetheless: Genghis_Khan -> Mongolian_language -> Mongolia -> Mongolian_language

There's no loop there: Genghis Khan -> Borjigin -> Clan -> People -> Human -> Taxonomy -> Science -> Knowledge -> Fact -> Information -> Sequence -> Mathematics -> Quantity -> Property (philosophy) -> Modern Philosophy -> Philosophy Mongolian language is in parentheses, so you don't end up in the infinite loop. So far, the only loop I can see is Panhard, though I'm sure someone will edit the page so that no longer ha…

Font loops, at least according to the rules (ignoring italics and parens).

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

#88

This is no joke: 21 clicks from Kevin Bacon to Philosophy. Welcome to the Internet equivalent of a child repeatedly asking, "why?"

Haha ya, it's crazy. I went to Wikipeida.com, clicked on a random link (Ratko_Mladić), and from there it took me 26 clicks of first links to reach the Philosophy page.

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

#89
post #9

It seems to take a while to search; are you querying wikipedia each step instead of a DB snapshot?

Last time I downloaded Wikipedia, it was 4.5GB. If I were to knock up this hack, I would definitely scrape pages instead.

On-demand page scrape + memoisation is almost certainly a win here. Even if thousands of people are hitting this, a lot will choose some of the same queries (I'm sure Kevin Bacon and xkcd and philosophy are in there a bunch), especially in the tails of the paths (Latin, Mathematics, ...)
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