Wikipedia is a dense oriented graph, no wonder it has many cycles. What's the big deal?
Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop
61–70 of 171 posts
Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop
#62As far as I know, this was noticed in May last year on the xkcd forums. http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=71309 There's a writeup of it with a gigantic picture over here: http://www.mrphlip.com/wikiphilosophy/
Seems like there is an even older link here on HN
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2584896
Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop
#63i started with "The Tyger" and got this:
The Tyger
William Blake
Romanticism
Industrial Revolution
United Kingdom
Britain (placename)
Great Britain
m3mnoch.
Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop
#64As far as I know, this was noticed in May last year on the xkcd forums. http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=71309 There's a writeup of it with a gigantic picture over here: http://www.mrphlip.com/wikiphilosophy/
Seems like there is an even older link here on HN http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2584896
OK, and this game http://spu.co/get-to-philosophy was played at least as far back as August 2010.
Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop
#65Nice demo, but I think it is an incorrect asumption that the first link is to a broader subject. For example, for Perú it says: "It is bordered on the north by Ecuador and Colombia, on the east by Brazil" So Perú->Ecuador left me with a big wtf..
Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop
#66As far as I know, this was noticed in May last year on the xkcd forums. http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=71309 There's a writeup of it with a gigantic picture over here: http://www.mrphlip.com/wikiphilosophy/
True, the "wikipedia loop" itself is not a new discovery. But still, congrats for coming up with a nice GUI to demonstrate it!
Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop
#67Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop
#68From a mathematical perspective, this is actually not that surprising. Think 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 finit…
Never thought about it as a finite state system, but that's a great way of looking at it.
Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop
#69In fact, according to a crawl of the Wikipedia database from May 2011, nearly 95% of Wikipedia articles will take you back to Philosophy.
- Always interested in the backstory of folks that sit around thinking this stuff up (and then testing it).
Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop
#70Interestingly, things like "Hat", "Shoe", and "Human" end up in a Psychology/Emotion loop, rather than the Philosophy loop.