EntropySink

Nothing & Everything => Open Discussion => Topic started by: Perspective on May 25, 2011, 01:55:55 PM

Title: "Wikipedia trivia"
Post by: Perspective on May 25, 2011, 01:55:55 PM

From today's xkcd:

Quote from: xkcd

Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at "Philosophy".

I've tried it twice and it worked both times. I think instead of doing work today I'm going to write a crawler to validate this over the entire wikipedia corpus.

Title: Re: "Wikipedia trivia"
Post by: micah on May 25, 2011, 01:59:11 PM

i saw that alt text this morning too but didn't try it until you just posted.

i randomly went to the page for the movie "sneakers" and ended up on "philosophy" after 16 clicks.

very interesting

Title: Re: "Wikipedia trivia"
Post by: Perspective on May 25, 2011, 02:16:20 PM

Found an infinite loop:

Mathematics -> Study -> Knowledge -> Facts -> Information -> Sequence -> Mathematics

Title: Re: "Wikipedia trivia"
Post by: Perspective on May 25, 2011, 02:17:56 PM

It's still pretty interesting how often it works. Says a lot about human knowledge when you really think about (in terms of organization and how we classify and describe things in terms of higher level concepts)

Title: Re: "Wikipedia trivia"
Post by: Mike on May 25, 2011, 02:47:18 PM

Porn -> Sexual intercourse -> Penis -> Vertebrate -> Subphylum -> Taxonomic rank -> Biological classification -> Biologist -> Scientist -> System -> Element (mathematics) -> Mathematics -> loop

The titles are the articles not the words.

Title: Re: "Wikipedia trivia"
Post by: jkim on May 25, 2011, 02:57:32 PM

Wait, when I go to "Information," "symbols" is the first word I encounter, not "sequence."

Title: Re: "Wikipedia trivia"
Post by: jkim on May 25, 2011, 02:59:07 PM

What the. Someone added the link at 2:41?

Title: Re: "Wikipedia trivia"
Post by: Dumah on May 25, 2011, 03:20:14 PM

Indo-European languages->Family->Languages->Human->Taxonomy->Ancient Greek->Greek Language->Indo-European languages

Loop

Title: Re: "Wikipedia trivia"
Post by: PJYelton on May 25, 2011, 03:20:50 PM

Yeah, I tried this also after reading XKCD on Spark Plug, Klingon, and Bulgaria and hit philosophy each time.  Looks like someone changed the Properties article though to bypass this.  Modern Philosophy used to be the first link but they rearranged the wording.

Title: Re: "Wikipedia trivia"
Post by: PJYelton on May 25, 2011, 03:23:14 PM

Yep, in the Properties change history there is this note:

Quote

Recently I heard that clicking the first link of articles, not including those in parenthases, will always lead to philosophy. All such paths I have found pass through this page, so I switched the first links around as a joke

Title: Re: "Wikipedia trivia"
Post by: Perspective on May 25, 2011, 03:57:51 PM

Quote from: jkim on May 25, 2011, 02:59:07 PM

What the. Someone added the link at 2:41?

haha, this isn't cool if it's engineered to comply to an xkcd comic!

Title: Re: "Wikipedia trivia"
Post by: Mike on May 25, 2011, 05:47:08 PM

With all the changes:
Portal (video game) -> Single-player video game -> Video game -> Electronic game -> Game -> Play (activity) -> Ethology -> Zoology -> Biology -> Natural Science -> Science ->  Knowledge -> Fact -> Information -> Finite Set -> Mathematics -> Quantity -> Property (philosophy) -> Modern philosophy -> Philosophy

Title: Re: "Wikipedia trivia"
Post by: ober on May 25, 2011, 10:45:17 PM

Yeah, I tried it with something earlier and got to Philosophy (after you all mentioned that the change had been made).

Title: Re: "Wikipedia trivia"
Post by: JaWiB on May 26, 2011, 02:28:38 AM

The first few I've tried have all gotten me to mathematics, which I find strangely satisfying.