Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Follow links to land in Philosophy

A couple of days back, the a cartoon was posted on xkcd titled "Extended Mind". In the mouse-over text, Randall Munroe wrote the following:
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 decided to test this theory and indeed managed to land to Philosophy every time !! Here is a demo run for the same:

Snickers > Candy Bar > Cocoa Solids > Chocolate > Mexico > Federation > Sovereign State > State (policy) > Social Sciences > List of Academic Disciplines > Academia > Community > Interaction > Causality > Event > Philosophy

I would be very interested in knowing if somebody find some topic that does not eventually lead back to Philosophy.

PS: To verify this theory I wrote a small Python program which starts from a random page and then traverses the first links until it finds loop or reaches Philosophy (or some threshold # of hops, say 1000). It ran for one night and gave me this loop:

Republic of India > Official names of India > Names of the Republic of India in its official languages > Republic of India (loop)


5 comments:

  1. http://lumpio.dy.fi/b/philosophy-party.html

    ReplyDelete
  2. Just as I suspected, there are exceptions:

    India > Official names of India > Names of the Republic of India in its official languages > Republic of India > Official names of India > Names of the Republic of India in its official languages > Republic of India (loop)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hey Bigyan,
    'official names of India' is in parentheses.

    India > state > social sciences > fields > academic > community > Interacting > causal > event > philosophy

    ReplyDelete
  4. @eSBy, thanks for pointing out the bug in my script ... I should use a standard HTML parser rather than doing the work by hand (which resulted in this error)

    However, here's a loop:

    Start with Soviet Union,
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union
    to
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_Soviet_Union
    to
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union

    ReplyDelete
  5. Awesome find...
    never thought of it... gr8 job bro

    ReplyDelete

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