Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop
31–40 of 171 posts
Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop
#32As noted by XKCD, everything is based on something else: http://xkcd.com/435/
And I think after Maths on that should come Philosophy.
Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop
#33"Honda" only goes 3 links
Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop
#34Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop
#35This is beautiful. I've always thought sites like IMDB and Wikipedia are hypertext expressions of the purest form. As a nerdy kid, over a few years I read my way through a significant chunk of the early 1990's Groliers Encyclopedia set my Grandma bought me at Krogers. And it was never cover-to-cover reading, instead it was filled with hopping around, page-to-page, volume-to-volume. Start at oscilloscope, but what's a…
Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop
#36Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop
#37Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop
#38My brain exploded.
Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop
#39Think of the act of clicking the first link in the Wikipedia article as a function that takes in the page you're on and outputs another page.
If you call this function on itself over and over again (ie use the output of one step as in the input of the next step), you will eventually enter a loop. The proof of this is simple: there are only a finite number of Wikipedia articles, therefore you must eventually reach an article you've seen before. (This is the same reason systems with a finite number of states cannot be chaotic.)
Since it's necessarily true that all articles will eventually reach a loop when you iteratively click the first link, we have to ask: how unusual is it that they usually reach the SAME loop?
Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop
#40I can't replicate it, but I encountered a weird bug. I entered "Star Trek" and hit Enter. The suggested items list appeared and I clicked on "Star Trek". Page titles appeared as normal, but everything appeared twice, like so: Star Trek Star Trek Cinema of the United States Film Cinema of the United States Recording Data Level of measurement Film ...etc until the last page title, "Reality" Seems like two processes wer…
I also got a weird one: Anime Animation The page you specified doesn't exist
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion
Is that an Easter Egg (illusion == doesn't exist)?