Comments on: All roads lead to "Philosophy"

By: ApolloHelix

ApolloHelix — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 07:22:00 +0000

I tried “hammer”.

It went into a loop from device>gadget>device

By: Will Doolittle

Will Doolittle — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 05:28:00 +0000

Wikipedia reflects reality! All western knowledge disciplines (e.g. chemistry, linguistics, alchemy, biebery) evolved from the soup we now know as “philosophy”, peeling off one by one as they acquired critical mass. Hence the advanced degree label “Doctor of Philosophy” (PhD).

By: GIFtheory

GIFtheory — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 02:21:00 +0000

When I try it with “Justin Bieber”, I get redirected into an endless loop between his page and “Justin Beaver.” This must be what hell is like.

Also, Maggie, I’m extremely jealous that you don’t know how to spell “Justin Bieber,” but I do.

By: David McKee

David McKee — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 00:13:00 +0000

“And, yes, I know, this is a biased exercise because it starts with a pre-chosen endpoint.”That’s not an issue: the chosen endpoint is the point at which almost all chains start to cycle.

It’s worth comparing this to the (unproven!) Collatz conjecture - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collatz_conjecture – pick a positive integer; half it if it is even, or triple it and add one if it is odd. Repeat. You always get one.

I’d theorise that this works for Wikipedia because many articles start with: ” is a ” or near-enough.

By: Donald Petersen

Donald Petersen — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 00:10:00 +0000

Dunno. ”Black Sabbath” only took 21 jumps, since mentioning they’re from Aston, Birmingham, took us into government by way of monarchy pretty quickly, instead of having to get there by way of Jimmy Page, the Order of the British Empire, and chivalry, which eventually sidetracks into the Seventeen Provinces before it gets all abstract again.

By: dahlia

dahlia — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 21:18:00 +0000

i’ll be damned, it works.

By: jamois

jamois — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 19:55:00 +0000

Hm. I went through 35 links and then was re-routed to Jimmy Wales’s page asking for donations. All roads lead to Jimmy Wales’ bank account.

By: Eric Rucker

Eric Rucker — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 19:15:00 +0000

Would’ve been more fun to modify the founder’s article, to make the chain longer. (Of course, that would make the chain from the founder to Philosophy shorter, but few would start from the founder.)

By: ravenlunatick

ravenlunatick — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 17:50:00 +0000

Whoa!

All we are is dust in the wind, dude.

Dust. Wind. Dude.

By: Eric Scheirer

Eric Scheirer — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 17:32:00 +0000

Yes, I added the link to Sandwich. Before that, it only linked to the founder, whose only link was right back to the Jimmy Johns article.

By: jere7my

jere7my — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 17:30:00 +0000

It's very pretty, but it doesn't reliably work for me. "Birdseed" leads to "bird food" and then "seed", but the first non-italic, non-parenthesized link on "bird food" is "food". ("Seed" is in parentheses, in fact.) The final link of that tree before "philosophy" is "Hindi", and the first link there is "standardized" — philosophy doesn't appear on the page. Perhaps it stalls out? But that wouldn't explain the bird food problem. There's a claim in the comments that the tool automatically eliminates loops, too: "But you might want to make it clearer that if the program actually finds a loop, an article linking back to another already encountered article, that it then selects the next possible link." I haven't verified this myself.

By: taintofevil

taintofevil — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 17:25:00 +0000

Did you fix it? I got Jimmy Johns > Sandwich > Bread > Staple food > Food > Plant > Life > Physical body > Physics > Natural science > Science > Knowledge > …

By: Rich Keller

Rich Keller — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 17:23:00 +0000

I like opening Wikipedia in two different tabs and clicking the random article in one. Then I see how many clicks it takes to go from the main page to the random article in the other tab. Wikimancy can be fun, too. It’s bibliomancy with the random article.

By: folkclarinet

folkclarinet — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 16:59:00 +0000

There’s a “Wikipedia game” where you click on “Random Article” and attempt to get to Jesus by selecting links in the random article and following articles until you get to the Jesus article. The goal is to get to Jesus in the fewest links possible.

A friend of mine came up with two variations on this, actually:

First, pick any article/topic/person/etc. and click on Random Article, following the above process until you find the chosen article.

Second, click Random Article, make a note of what that page is, and then click Random Article again, following above instructions until you get back to the first Random Article! :)

By: Eric Rucker

Eric Rucker — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 16:54:00 +0000

Interestingly, looks like the tool referenced in the article misses some things – on ARM architecture, it goes for ARM Holdings instead of 32-bit. Which does make quite a difference on the path length – 32-bit makes it quite a bit shorter.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 16:54:00 +0000

I tried this with rock music on Amazon one time. All rock bands lead to the Pixies. At the time, I was already quite sure the Pixies were the acme of rock music so this finding simply confirmed my opinion.

By: Dewi Morgan

Dewi Morgan — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 16:13:00 +0000

Highest I’ve found so far is 28 nodes each, for “NASA” and “Fallout (game)”. Anyone find a longer one?

By: rastronomicals

rastronomicals — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 16:02:00 +0000

The tool should count the number of jumps, which could then, like a Bacon number or an Erdős number, be treated as the hub of the game.

“Led Zeppelin,” for example takes 27 jumps to “Philosophy.” Is this “P-number” more or leass than average?

By: Eric Rucker

Eric Rucker — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 16:01:00 +0000

I’m just playing by xkcd’s rules here. ;)

By: EvilSpirit

EvilSpirit — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 15:59:00 +0000

No, but it’s reasonable to assume that it may be incidental. That’s kind of what parentheses are for.

By: Bookburn

Bookburn — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 15:55:00 +0000

So should information that is included in parentheses not be considered part of the article?

By: Ravyn Schmidt

Ravyn Schmidt — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 15:54:00 +0000

@ bhtooefr: Herp Derp, I was doing it wrong. For some reason I read it as the first “See Also” link. Reading FTW.

By: Hollando

Hollando — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 15:53:00 +0000

Aha! And also, presumptively, not part of Wikipedia’s meta-commentary.
Thanks for the clarification.

By: cnoocy

cnoocy — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 15:44:00 +0000

It’s the first link that is neither in parentheses nor in italics.

By: Eric Scheirer

Eric Scheirer — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 15:43:00 +0000

@Derek Martin: Now it does.

By: Hollando

Hollando — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 15:42:00 +0000

I tried this, and didn’t have much success.
What counts as the “first” link?
If it is literally the first link on the page, it doesn’t work for me.

By: Derek Reed Martin

Derek Reed Martin — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 15:32:00 +0000

“Jimmy Johns” the sandwich franchise does not lead to philosophy! Impossible! I based most of my life on the philosophy of sandwiches. This is worse than the time neutrinos went faster than light!

By: Eric Rucker

Eric Rucker — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 15:18:00 +0000

Hyracotherium -> Extinction -> Biology -> Natural science -> Science -> Knowledge and then down that whole path that I posted earlier along Information down to Philosophy.

By: Ravyn Schmidt

Ravyn Schmidt — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 15:16:00 +0000

Hyracotherium dosn’t work. :(

By: Eric Rucker

Eric Rucker — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 15:15:00 +0000

Information goes back to Philosophy, though, and Knowledge’s first hop is to Information.

Oh, and the Philosophy loop is:

Philosophy -> Ontology -> Philosophy.