Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop

#151

Post by jamescun » Sat, Sep 01, 2012, 8:20 AM UTC

We used to play this as a game back in high school. First one to find the loop won.

Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop

#152

Post by dbaupp » Sat, Sep 01, 2012, 8:42 AM UTC

lbarrow wrote: post #39

From 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…

This is the same reason systems with a finite number of states cannot be chaotic

Without more information, I don't think this is true. It is true if the transition function between states depends on a finite number of previous ones (WLOG if s_n is a function of only s_{n-1}), but I think that it isn't if the transition depends on an infinite number.

(Though, in this case, clearly there is no history, so what you say is true.)

Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop

#153

Post by eru » Sat, Sep 01, 2012, 9:20 AM UTC

dbaupp wrote: post #152

lbarrow wrote: post #39

From 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…

This is the same reason systems with a finite number of states cannot be chaotic Without more information, I don't think this is true. It is true if the transition function between states depends on a finite number of previous ones (WLOG if s_n is a function of only s_{n-1}), but I think that it isn't if the transition depends on an infinite number. (Though, in this case, clearly there is no history, so what you say…

If your model only depends on at most a maximum fixed length of history, you can always model your finite systems to only depend on the most recent state. (Just make a copy of the history part of that state.)

In the case of depending on up to an infinite history, I wouldn't call that system to have a finite number of states any longer.

Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop

#154

Post by tsahyt » Sat, Sep 01, 2012, 9:44 AM UTC

jlgreco wrote: post #60

api wrote: post #38

Either philosophy is a dead end, then, or it is the base of all knowledge. Depends on whether knowledge is a tree or a graph, which is... a philosophical question! My brain exploded.

Trees are connected acyclic graphs, so knowledge could be both. ;)

Yes but graphs can very well be cyclic, so eventually a path from a node could lead back to the node itself.

Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop

#155

Post by INTPenis » Sat, Sep 01, 2012, 10:33 AM UTC

jamescun wrote: post #151

We used to play this as a game back in high school. First one to find the loop won.

Same but at the boring callcenter job I had at the time. Dell Enterprise support, we would get virtually no calls sometimes and we would make up shit to find on wikipedia and whoever found it from a specified starting point in the least amount of jumps won.

Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop

#156

Post by Nitramp » Sat, Sep 01, 2012, 12:28 PM UTC

lbarrow wrote: post #39

From 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…

The fact that many lead to the same loop(1) of Argument Logic in unsurprising, too. Wikipedia articles usually define their subject in in the first sentence. Defining things works by saying what general category they belong to, then by differentiating them within that.

E.g.

A fish is any member of a paraphyletic group of organisms that consist of all gill-bearing aquatic craniate animals that lack limbs with digits.

Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) is an American _multinational corporation_ which provides Internet-related products and services [...]

A table is a form of _furniture_ with a flat and satisfactory horizontal upper surface [...]

And so on. If you always walk up the abstraction chain because you're picking the first link (the general category), you'll end up at the root of the categorization tree, which is likely something along the lines of Argument, Logic, Fact etc.

Note however that the current state of wikipedia has a different root loop for me, Logic leads to Philosophy.

(1) or one of a very limited number of loops, I also saw Science Knowledge.

Re: Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop

#157

Post by planckscnst » Sat, Sep 01, 2012, 12:29 PM UTC

kevinh wrote: post #95

I seem to have broken it here: http://wikiloopr.com/List%20of%20minor%20planets:%2075001%E2... Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minor_planets:_75001%E2... That is, however, a weird Wikipedia page. It seems like the first link is a target to another location on the page, which (I'd assume) would put it in an infinite loop.

"Egypt" also breaks.