Inspired by XKCD:903, Wikipedia steps to philosophy

[joshklein]

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

[sophacles]

This shows a that the program linked is broken. The steps taken, are:

1. Animal House 2. ....

Going to the actual Kevin Bacon Wikipedia page, Animal House is clearly italic. The First non-italic, top-level (wrt parens) is Golden Globe

[billpaetzke]

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.

[malloc]

minor correction: 20 clicks

[neurolysis]

Three, actually. Kevin Bacon > Meme > Philosophy.

[chrislloyd]

A few years ago at Railscamp in Australia, Andrew Grimm proved this exact outcome. His code is here: https://github.com/agrimm/philosophy-dump-parser and https://github.com/agrimm/philosophy-navigation.

[camtarn]

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 step, going via transport, commerce, San Juan de Dios Market, Mexico, Romance languages, Precambrian, Chronology, etc...

[iopuy]

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.

[mikeleeorg]

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.

[caf]

F-111 is 45 steps.

[danielrhodes]

I found a loop for Jersey Shore. I guess that sounds about right though.

[shrikant]

"Beans" is 28 steps..

[zephjc]

found another loop, on my first try nonetheless:

Genghis_Khan -> Mongolian_language -> Mongolia -> Mongolian_language

[sili]

If it finds a loop, can't it go and explore other paths?

[6ren]

    recursion

       1. Recursive
       2. Recursion

    uh oh... found a loop

    recursion -> recursive -> recursion.

[Spikefu]

Recursion, self-similar, mathematics, quantity, property, modern philosophy, philosophy

Assuming you don't include the links in the "lacks inline citations" box on the recursion page.

[conradev]

Theres a Wikipedia page on it, it works on 93% of all articles.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Get_to_Philosophy

[nickolai]

XKCD

    Webcomic
    Comics
    Graphic
    Visual_perception
    Visible_light
    Electromagnetic_radiation
    Energy
    Physics
    Natural_science
    Science
    Knowledge
    Fact
    Information
    Sequence
    Mathematics
    Quantity
    Property_(philosophy)
    Modern_philosophy
    Philosophy

19 steps to philosophy

[rufibarbatus]

Main_Page is currently taking 19 steps too. (According to the program—other comments here point out that it may be ignoring the comic's rules.)

[billpaetzke]

I wonder if we could say everything leads to science. I also reached philosophy via science.

Ratko Mladic (randomly chosen from wikipedia homepage)

        Army of Republika Srpska
	Military
	Use of force
	Conflict resolution
	Negotiation
	Dialogue
	Literature
	Fiction
	Narrative
	Latin
	Italic languages
	Indo-European languages
	Language family
	Language
	Human
	Taxonomy
	Science
	Knowledge
	Fact
	Information
	Sequence
	Mathematics
	Quantity
	Property_(philosophy)
	Modern_philosophy
	Philosophy

[albertsun]

I tried it with Iraq, but the page parsing is slightly wrong. Got this result.

Iraq Arabic_language Languages Human Precambrian Eon_(geology) Chronology Time Measurement Magnitude_(mathematics) Property_(philosophy) Modern_philosophy Philosophy 12 steps to philosophy

But the link to Arabic is in parentheses. The first non-parenthesesed link is to Western Asia.

[p4bl0]

An article[1] from the Xamuel.com's blog predates the xkcd stripe by a few days and states the sames things but with mathematics instead of philosophy. Also their's some fun with second links.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2573038

[araneae]

And the version using philosophy appeared on Reddit before the comic as well: http://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/hgwbe/on_wikiped...

[bena]

Two problems. It favors links in the sidebar over article links. I was in "Human" and your script picked out Pre-Cambrian when it should have been Taxonomy.

Second, capitalization matters. It couldn't find "the black keys" but it found "The Black Keys".

It's pretty obvious in hindsight when you think about it. You start with something specific and then get more and more vague until you hit Philosophy.

[orblivion]

It totally worked for me, I tried it with Sausage and Cradle of Filth. I thought it was a joke, it blew me away.

But then I found that "Osama Bin Laden" crossed "philosophers" and then ended on a loop between "reason" and "rationality".

EDIT: I just tried "Osama Bin Laden", the steps it takes seems to be using a slightly different Wikipedia than I see.

[bad_user]

I tried OOP, eventually arriving at Philosophy -- OMG, it works :))

[shawndumas]

That's 'cause Philosophy covers it all:

"Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language." --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy

[lloeki]

Too bad there's no Philosophy in http://xkcd.com/435/

[dchest]

Or, in other terms: http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/hgkdl/mindblown/c1v8fy...

[lloeki]

Wow, someone just modified Modern Philosophy (now first link is Western Europe), Science and/or Knowledge pages, which makes most previously things tried by me kick into a 25 loop. I'm wondering if it's intentional.

[hugh3]

Most things were getting stuck in a loop around "Indo-European languages" last time I checked. Someone is definitely playing silly buggers.

I was tempted to see whether I could somehow engineer an all-roads-lead-to-goatse situation, but I couldn't think of a plausible pathway.

[Fargren]

You don't reach Philosophy from Philosophy.

[malvim]

Hey, I did!

Did it using the software and then checked wikipedia by hand:

Philosophy -> Existence -> Sense -> Organism -> Biology -> Natural_science -> Science -> Knowledge -> Fact -> Information -> Finite_set -> Mathematics -> Quantity -> Property_(philosophy) -> Modern_philosophy -> Philosophy

15 steps to philosophy

[mauriciob]

Yes, you do. 15 steps.

[clemesha]

Related: http://TheWikiGame.com (I built this app, it's made with using django, xmpp, and almost every datatype that Redis provides)

[docmarionum1]

Modern Philosophy now goes to Western Europe rather than Philosophy. And since everything seems to go through that, nothing will reach philosophy anymore.

[blago]

I did this a while ago with node.js: http://blago.dachev.com/wikidrill

[mbubb]

Fun

Interesting that the first three i tried took about 17 hops and got funnelled through the "Life" entry.

corndog sensimilia halitosis

This took a few less hops and stayed in 'techne': voip.

Would love to see these searches graphed.

Years ago - one of my favorite sites was Everything2 (still up) - it was run on the slashdot engine. The fun of it was to follow the associated links at the bottom of the entry to see where it would take you.

[oldminer]

Slashdot used to link to Everything (back before it was Everything2) as a sort of instant-dictionary for tech terms. Stories would have something like "RSS 2.0(?) and Atom(?) proponents are squaring off..." with the question marks going to the relevant Everything node. Most of the time, the terms wouldn't be defined until the story went live, and then they would be in short order.

It was a neat symbiosis, especially back before Wikipedia existed. However, they were separate sites. Both Slashcode (which runs Slashdot) and the Everything Engine (which runs Everything2) are written in Perl. Everything was never run on Slashcode, though, AFAIK.

[camtarn]

E2 was wonderful for links teleporting you off into completely unrelated and equally fascinating subjects - I lost many an evening in that manner :)

[tobylane]

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.

[jrockway]

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".

[mikeleeorg]

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).

[hencq]

Nice tool :-) It seems to also take words between parentheses though I think. For example on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceland I would expect it to follow European not Icelandic.

[jrockway]

Ironically, it doesn't work from "Spark Plug".

[assemble]

Strange, it did for me yesterday.

Edit: Modern Philosophy seems to be missing the link to Philosophy, which should be there according to the edit history (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Modern_philosophy&...).