10 ms·

Six Degrees of Wikipedia

175 points by sharkweek 5y ago

darkwizard42 5y ago
The "wiki game" where two people click Random Page and try to get to each other's page via blue links only is one of my favorites. Obviously we never got there optimally but very cool to see this visualized and created. semi-related, I wonder if there are any new papers on how to optimally generate blue links on Wiki pages and how great linking can happen more auto-magically!
- orange3xchicken 5y ago
  Not sure if this is what you mean, but I found an ongoing Wikimedia research project & preprint: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Link_recommendation_model_for_add-a-link_structured_task https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Link_recommendation... https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.15110 https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.15110
drdeca 5y ago
Appears to be suffering from a partial hug of death atm, but is pretty cool. Was surprised how few jumps needed for many things. (E.g. 3 jumps from “metric tensor” to “Ronald Reagan” along many possible paths)
- srmarm 5y ago
  3 degrees of separation seems to be the sweet spot for most of the combos I tested. Brilliant project and worked pretty fast for me
marcodiego 5y ago
> Whoops... Six Degrees of Wikipedia is temporarily unavailable. Please try again in a few seconds. HN hug of death?
- junon 5y ago
  Seems like it!
bntyhntr 5y ago
In school, we used to have "wiki races" when we were bored (I later googled this and we were far from the only ones). Pick a start and end article and race to see who got there first, verification via the back button on your browser. For speed purposes, it was usually easiest to just bubble up to the biggest unit of geography in common and then narrow back down. In college we made a site that represented each wikipedia page as a graph, with sections and links serving as nodes and leafs. It was a pretty fun visualization but we fell short of our ill-defined goal to page rank Wikipedia. This is pretty neat! And it reinforces my belief that bubbling up is the way to go. In the example it gave me, only a few of the 35 paths didn't immediately jump to a very general concept. One of those was "leet" though :)
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  Hyperbolic geometry.
- tbenst 5y ago
  The game is called Wiki Ball! I played it too—fond memories of navigating category pages..
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  Oh, I play this game when I don't know the name of something. Get in the page of a similar concept, bubble up and then down.
- BitAstronaut 5y ago
  https://www.thewikigame.com/app https://www.thewikigame.com/app
mikewarot 5y ago
Slide Rule --> Surface Plate was pretty cool.
bArray 5y ago
> Sorry internet hipster, this little side project requires JavaScript. Touché.
- ASalazarMX 5y ago
  <angrily sips homegrown herb infusion>
- omoikane 5y ago
  This is one of the best error messages of this sort that I have seen as a Lynx user.
  - prirai 5y ago
    Yep, makes me sad. It's the reason I made my site fully optimized for text based browsers too. Have a look : prirai.github.io/nav.html Also, I parsed some books from various paces to make a neat archive. The themes will be visible only on a GUI browser tho. You won't need javascript.
lapetitejort 5y ago
Go to any sizable wiki page and click the first wiki link, then repeat. The theory goes that eventually you will end up at Philosophy. For example Eddie Vedder took seven clicks to reach Philosophy. It's not a law, however. "Township High School District 211" sent me into an infinite loop: United States Contiguous United States Alaska U.S. State United States Perhaps I should edit one of the pages to prevent that...?
- davidholdeman 5y ago
  When I play this game, I click the N+1th link if I have already visited the Nth link.
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  I played this a few times. While it does vaguely work, it seems to follow a pretty consistent route and benefits from the fact that philosophy is preceded by "idea", which seems like the more proper root of the epistemological tree.
- Nition 5y ago
  Awesome, it works! I picked a random town and got to Philosophy in fifteen steps. I got from Sushi to Philosophy in 24 steps. All concepts abstract upwards as you go on until you're at pure thought. Deprimo, ergo cogito. For the record I ignored links in the initial brackets. Beyond Philosophy there's an infinite redirect loop between Metaphysics and Philosophy.
- ragazzina 5y ago
  >It's not a law, however. "Township High School District 211" sent me into an infinite loop Incidentally, both "Lemont Township 210" and "Leyden High School District 212" end up at Philosophy.
Timpy 5y ago
I ran one then opened the wikipedia page to verify it, I couldn't find the links. List of common misconceptions -> Denzel Washington Allegedly these pages are only 2 degrees apart by way of Hal B. Wallis, Orson Welles, and Humphrey Bogart. I couldn't find Denzel Washington on any of those pages (but all three of them appear on the list of common misconceptions page).
- crude-technical 5y ago
  At the bottom of the page (after References and External Links etc) are multiple collapsible info boxes. For example, Orson Welles has one for an AFI Life Achievement Award, which Washington has also received. This feels like it would be either an advanced technique in wiki ball, or houseruled out. I personally think it definitely counts as a link in the article, though.
xeromal 5y ago
I can't get it to work. :(
- bmn__ 5y ago
  This result link should be cached, does this work for you? https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Erd%C5%91s&target=Kevin%20Bacon https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Erd%C5%91s&tar...
  - xeromal 5y ago
    It does! Thanks! I think my query was just an impossible one. https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=University%20of%20California,%20San%20Francisco&target=Ellijay,%20Georgia https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=University%20o...
s_dev 5y ago
Recall this being a school project from a classmate. Was disappointed to learn the article centre of Wikipedia beyond the list articles e.g. 2019 was 'the United Kingdom' this was back in 2007 or 2008 or something.
_z1234 5y ago
I tried "Pembroke welsh corgi" to "Moose", it said 2 degrees. But I couldn't find the outward edge links from "Moose" -> "cattle" and vice versa?
- distances 5y ago
  It's probably in one of the expandable boxes. Check the page source code to find the link a bit easier.
jwngr 5y ago
Creator here. It's exciting to see this back on the front page of HN! My poor little f1-micro instance is not holding up well against the traffic though I won't be able to migrate it to a bigger server today, but if you bookmark it and check back in a day or two, it'll be back up. If you think this is cool, I'm working on a huge new thing with some former Firebasers and others. Follow me @_jwngr on Twitter (https://twitter.com/_jwngr https://twitter.com/_jwngr) for a big reveal coming very soon! Here is the original HN post for those who are interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16468196 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16468196
- scandox 5y ago
  What exactly counts as a link? Because I linked Pope Urban II to Corinthian Leather and found no actual link between the penultimate article Leather Crafting and Corinthian Leather.
  - davweb 5y ago
    Go to the bottom of the Leather Crafting page and expand the "Leather" navigation box and the link to Corinthian Leather is in there.
    - scandox 5y ago
      I note they don't have that on mobile. Not trying to be pedantic but I think potentially more interesting though lengthier connections would be made if links had to be within the text content of the article itself.
      - kwhitefoot 5y ago
        I think the result should also show where the links are in the pages. It's only two steps from where I live to where I was born even though the two towns are in different countries. But it goes via the page for Demonym and the page for where I live doesn't seem to have a link to Demonym even when I examine the HTML.
tombert 5y ago
Huh, fun to learn that there's only three degrees of separation between Norm MacDonald and Miguel De Cervantes. I love projects like this; they do a good job making the world feel a bit smaller.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bob229 5y ago
Wikipedia is truly awful
arittr 5y ago
i love it. i used to play this late night in college with whoever was around... part of me feels like seeing the graph takes a little of the joy out of it, but that's the same part of me that wishes i made this myself.
malkia 5y ago
Was wondering about https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=bulgaria&target=ska https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=bulgaria&targe... - but site maybe getting too much to work right now (would check later!)
- malkia 5y ago
  ah, it worked now - heheh (so I was curious about "Bulgaria" and "ska" music): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgaria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgaria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrestling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrestling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Santo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Santo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ska https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ska The El_Santo is the real connection here (" The Latin ska band King Changó released an album titled The Return of El Santo.") from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Return_of_El_Santo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Return_of_El_Santo fun times :) I should search on "death metal" next, etc. (should be more connections) - it's the two styles of music I like most...
kloch 5y ago
Has anyone found a 5 or 6 minimum degree search? The longest I have found is 4: Triumph TR-7 to Apple iic
- Aulex 5y ago
  I found one with 5 degrees. Rostam to Hydro Flask
- lakis 5y ago
  No path https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Anavryto&target=Boundary%20vector%20field https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Anavryto&targe...
  - hansbo 5y ago
    Seems like no article links to Boundary Vector Field. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/Boundary_vector_field https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/Boundary...
- adamjb 5y ago
  Found a 6 degree path https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Victoria%20(3D%20figure)&target=Max%20Rowley%20(cyclist) https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Victoria%20(3D...
- FiatLuxDave 5y ago
  Cwenthryth to Nuclear Pasta, 442 paths with 5 degrees of separation. My favorite path is probably: Cwenthryth (Mercian Princess) Old English Weregild Gold Neutron Star Nuclear Pasta
- yongjik 5y ago
  Haha found a 7 degree pair! Mitchell order -> Mun Ikjeom https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Mitchell%20order&target=Mun%20Ikjeom https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Mitchell%20ord...
Jorge1o1 5y ago
So I just learned that there’s a direct link from Adolf Hitler to Jeff Bezos… 1 degree. Vandalism?
- adamjb 5y ago
  They've both been Time's Person of the Year
8bitsrule 5y ago
I tested it starting with the name of a rarely-mentioned (US) indian reservation. The name was first always 'linked' with a completely unrelated state in the US. Pretty damn weak link. I suppose you could just go through 'universe' to reduce the degrees to two. What's the point?
- distances 5y ago
  It follows Wikipedia links of the given pages. The connections aren't arbitrary.
peter303 5y ago
The 6 degrees experimental result was based on snailmail. In social media its 4 degrees, probably due occasional supernodes- people with over a thousand connections.
yurishimo 5y ago
We used to play a version of this game in high school. Click for a random article, then see who could get to Hitler the fastest because we were "edgy" teenagers. Good times!
- BoxOfRain 5y ago
  We used to play this! I'm not quite sure why it was Hitler of all topics, I guess because he's the most offensive thing that's not blocked by your average secondary school's internet filter.
  - emteycz 5y ago
    There is a popular saying that everything is connected to Hitler in 7 steps or so
hkai 5y ago
I've tried "Bill Gates" to "Wuhan Institute of Virology" and I'm pleased with the results.
xomateix 5y ago
This made me remember a webpage that using IMDB would calculate the degrees of separation between Nicolas Cage and the input person (actress, director...) of your choice. I did a quick search and couldn't find it. Does anybody remember it? I'm wondering if my memory or my search skills are failing or if it has simply disappeared.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  sure it wasn't 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon
  - gingericha 5y ago
    And at one point even, google allowed you to directly search for someone's bacon number: https://www.wired.com/2012/09/easter-egg-google-connects-the-dots-for-bacon-number-search/ https://www.wired.com/2012/09/easter-egg-google-connects-the...
- agucova 5y ago
  In the course Introduction to Computer Science: AI (CS50AI) by Harvard, one of the first homeworks is implementing a search exactly like this with Python. It was extremely fun!
- richrichardsson 5y ago
  I've only ever heard of something similar, the Bacon Number, which is the degrees of separation between a given person and Kevin Bacon [1]. My Bacon Number is 2, having been an extra in Alexander, which featured Connor Paolo, who was in Mystic River with Kevin Bacon. [1] https://www.oracleofbacon.org/help.php https://www.oracleofbacon.org/help.php
StapleHorse 5y ago
I did something similar back in the uni days. However, one node was fixed to 'Chuck Norris' in order to do the search quickly. The first version with both random articles sometimes timeout the apache.
whiterock 5y ago
fails for me for: Linz (capital of Upper Austria) -> Brouwer‘s fixed point theorem Error: Whoops.
unobatbayar 5y ago
Tried "Mongolia" to "United States". My mind is blown; 222 paths with 2 degrees and the nodes look like an atom with a dark hole next to the nucleus.
jerryluc 5y ago
Shameless plug: I’ve made a small and stupid game where you’re presented Wikipedia articles and you have to guess which article is not linked to by any of the other articles. https://havarnov.github.io/oddoneout/ https://havarnov.github.io/oddoneout/
- MrsPeaches 5y ago
  Fun! Would be cool if clicking/taping the article titles would take you to the actual articles. Some interesting sounding ones popped up!
WGH_ 5y ago
I wish it could optionally ignore the info boxes and navbars. They kinda feel like cheating.

175 points by sharkweek 5y ago

The "wiki game" where two people click Random Page and try to get to each other's page via blue links only is one of my favorites. Obviously we never got there optimally but very cool to see this visualized and created. semi-related, I wonder if there are any new papers on how to optimally generate blue links on Wiki pages and how great linking can happen more auto-magically!

orange3xchicken 5y ago
Not sure if this is what you mean, but I found an ongoing Wikimedia research project & preprint: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Link_recommendation_model_for_add-a-link_structured_task https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Link_recommendation... https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.15110 https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.15110

drdeca 5y ago

Appears to be suffering from a partial hug of death atm, but is pretty cool. Was surprised how few jumps needed for many things. (E.g. 3 jumps from “metric tensor” to “Ronald Reagan” along many possible paths)

srmarm 5y ago
3 degrees of separation seems to be the sweet spot for most of the combos I tested. Brilliant project and worked pretty fast for me

marcodiego 5y ago

> Whoops... Six Degrees of Wikipedia is temporarily unavailable. Please try again in a few seconds. HN hug of death?

junon 5y ago
Seems like it!

bntyhntr 5y ago

In school, we used to have "wiki races" when we were bored (I later googled this and we were far from the only ones). Pick a start and end article and race to see who got there first, verification via the back button on your browser. For speed purposes, it was usually easiest to just bubble up to the biggest unit of geography in common and then narrow back down. In college we made a site that represented each wikipedia page as a graph, with sections and links serving as nodes and leafs. It was a pretty fun visualization but we fell short of our ill-defined goal to page rank Wikipedia. This is pretty neat! And it reinforces my belief that bubbling up is the way to go. In the example it gave me, only a few of the 35 paths didn't immediately jump to a very general concept. One of those was "leet" though :)

Ericson2314 5y ago
Hyperbolic geometry.
tbenst 5y ago
The game is called Wiki Ball! I played it too—fond memories of navigating category pages..
marcosdumay 5y ago
Oh, I play this game when I don't know the name of something. Get in the page of a similar concept, bubble up and then down.
BitAstronaut 5y ago
https://www.thewikigame.com/app https://www.thewikigame.com/app

mikewarot 5y ago

Slide Rule --> Surface Plate was pretty cool.

bArray 5y ago

> Sorry internet hipster, this little side project requires JavaScript. Touché.

ASalazarMX 5y ago
<angrily sips homegrown herb infusion>
omoikane 5y ago
This is one of the best error messages of this sort that I have seen as a Lynx user.
- prirai 5y ago
  Yep, makes me sad. It's the reason I made my site fully optimized for text based browsers too. Have a look : prirai.github.io/nav.html Also, I parsed some books from various paces to make a neat archive. The themes will be visible only on a GUI browser tho. You won't need javascript.

lapetitejort 5y ago

Go to any sizable wiki page and click the first wiki link, then repeat. The theory goes that eventually you will end up at Philosophy. For example Eddie Vedder took seven clicks to reach Philosophy. It's not a law, however. "Township High School District 211" sent me into an infinite loop: United States Contiguous United States Alaska U.S. State United States Perhaps I should edit one of the pages to prevent that...?

davidholdeman 5y ago
When I play this game, I click the N+1th link if I have already visited the Nth link.
spywaregorilla 5y ago
I played this a few times. While it does vaguely work, it seems to follow a pretty consistent route and benefits from the fact that philosophy is preceded by "idea", which seems like the more proper root of the epistemological tree.
Nition 5y ago
Awesome, it works! I picked a random town and got to Philosophy in fifteen steps. I got from Sushi to Philosophy in 24 steps. All concepts abstract upwards as you go on until you're at pure thought. Deprimo, ergo cogito. For the record I ignored links in the initial brackets. Beyond Philosophy there's an infinite redirect loop between Metaphysics and Philosophy.
ragazzina 5y ago
>It's not a law, however. "Township High School District 211" sent me into an infinite loop Incidentally, both "Lemont Township 210" and "Leyden High School District 212" end up at Philosophy.

Timpy 5y ago

I ran one then opened the wikipedia page to verify it, I couldn't find the links. List of common misconceptions -> Denzel Washington Allegedly these pages are only 2 degrees apart by way of Hal B. Wallis, Orson Welles, and Humphrey Bogart. I couldn't find Denzel Washington on any of those pages (but all three of them appear on the list of common misconceptions page).

crude-technical 5y ago
At the bottom of the page (after References and External Links etc) are multiple collapsible info boxes. For example, Orson Welles has one for an AFI Life Achievement Award, which Washington has also received. This feels like it would be either an advanced technique in wiki ball, or houseruled out. I personally think it definitely counts as a link in the article, though.

xeromal 5y ago

I can't get it to work. :(

bmn__ 5y ago
This result link should be cached, does this work for you? https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Erd%C5%91s&target=Kevin%20Bacon https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Erd%C5%91s&tar...
- xeromal 5y ago
  It does! Thanks! I think my query was just an impossible one. https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=University%20of%20California,%20San%20Francisco&target=Ellijay,%20Georgia https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=University%20o...

s_dev 5y ago

Recall this being a school project from a classmate. Was disappointed to learn the article centre of Wikipedia beyond the list articles e.g. 2019 was 'the United Kingdom' this was back in 2007 or 2008 or something.

_z1234 5y ago

I tried "Pembroke welsh corgi" to "Moose", it said 2 degrees. But I couldn't find the outward edge links from "Moose" -> "cattle" and vice versa?

distances 5y ago
It's probably in one of the expandable boxes. Check the page source code to find the link a bit easier.

jwngr 5y ago

Creator here. It's exciting to see this back on the front page of HN! My poor little f1-micro instance is not holding up well against the traffic though I won't be able to migrate it to a bigger server today, but if you bookmark it and check back in a day or two, it'll be back up. If you think this is cool, I'm working on a huge new thing with some former Firebasers and others. Follow me @_jwngr on Twitter (https://twitter.com/_jwngr https://twitter.com/_jwngr) for a big reveal coming very soon! Here is the original HN post for those who are interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16468196 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16468196

scandox 5y ago
What exactly counts as a link? Because I linked Pope Urban II to Corinthian Leather and found no actual link between the penultimate article Leather Crafting and Corinthian Leather.
- davweb 5y ago
  Go to the bottom of the Leather Crafting page and expand the "Leather" navigation box and the link to Corinthian Leather is in there.
  - scandox 5y ago
    I note they don't have that on mobile. Not trying to be pedantic but I think potentially more interesting though lengthier connections would be made if links had to be within the text content of the article itself.
    - kwhitefoot 5y ago
      I think the result should also show where the links are in the pages. It's only two steps from where I live to where I was born even though the two towns are in different countries. But it goes via the page for Demonym and the page for where I live doesn't seem to have a link to Demonym even when I examine the HTML.

tombert 5y ago

Huh, fun to learn that there's only three degrees of separation between Norm MacDonald and Miguel De Cervantes. I love projects like this; they do a good job making the world feel a bit smaller.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

bob229 5y ago

Wikipedia is truly awful

arittr 5y ago

i love it. i used to play this late night in college with whoever was around... part of me feels like seeing the graph takes a little of the joy out of it, but that's the same part of me that wishes i made this myself.

malkia 5y ago

Was wondering about https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=bulgaria&target=ska https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=bulgaria&targe... - but site maybe getting too much to work right now (would check later!)

malkia 5y ago
ah, it worked now - heheh (so I was curious about "Bulgaria" and "ska" music): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgaria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgaria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrestling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrestling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Santo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Santo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ska https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ska The El_Santo is the real connection here (" The Latin ska band King Changó released an album titled The Return of El Santo.") from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Return_of_El_Santo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Return_of_El_Santo fun times :) I should search on "death metal" next, etc. (should be more connections) - it's the two styles of music I like most...

kloch 5y ago

Has anyone found a 5 or 6 minimum degree search? The longest I have found is 4: Triumph TR-7 to Apple iic

Aulex 5y ago
I found one with 5 degrees. Rostam to Hydro Flask
lakis 5y ago
No path https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Anavryto&target=Boundary%20vector%20field https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Anavryto&targe...
- hansbo 5y ago
  Seems like no article links to Boundary Vector Field. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/Boundary_vector_field https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/Boundary...
adamjb 5y ago
Found a 6 degree path https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Victoria%20(3D%20figure)&target=Max%20Rowley%20(cyclist) https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Victoria%20(3D...
FiatLuxDave 5y ago
Cwenthryth to Nuclear Pasta, 442 paths with 5 degrees of separation. My favorite path is probably: Cwenthryth (Mercian Princess) Old English Weregild Gold Neutron Star Nuclear Pasta
yongjik 5y ago
Haha found a 7 degree pair! Mitchell order -> Mun Ikjeom https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Mitchell%20order&target=Mun%20Ikjeom https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Mitchell%20ord...

Jorge1o1 5y ago

So I just learned that there’s a direct link from Adolf Hitler to Jeff Bezos… 1 degree. Vandalism?

adamjb 5y ago
They've both been Time's Person of the Year

8bitsrule 5y ago

I tested it starting with the name of a rarely-mentioned (US) indian reservation. The name was first always 'linked' with a completely unrelated state in the US. Pretty damn weak link. I suppose you could just go through 'universe' to reduce the degrees to two. What's the point?

distances 5y ago
It follows Wikipedia links of the given pages. The connections aren't arbitrary.

peter303 5y ago

The 6 degrees experimental result was based on snailmail. In social media its 4 degrees, probably due occasional supernodes- people with over a thousand connections.

yurishimo 5y ago

We used to play a version of this game in high school. Click for a random article, then see who could get to Hitler the fastest because we were "edgy" teenagers. Good times!

BoxOfRain 5y ago
We used to play this! I'm not quite sure why it was Hitler of all topics, I guess because he's the most offensive thing that's not blocked by your average secondary school's internet filter.
- emteycz 5y ago
  There is a popular saying that everything is connected to Hitler in 7 steps or so

hkai 5y ago

I've tried "Bill Gates" to "Wuhan Institute of Virology" and I'm pleased with the results.

xomateix 5y ago

This made me remember a webpage that using IMDB would calculate the degrees of separation between Nicolas Cage and the input person (actress, director...) of your choice. I did a quick search and couldn't find it. Does anybody remember it? I'm wondering if my memory or my search skills are failing or if it has simply disappeared.

bryanrasmussen 5y ago
sure it wasn't 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon
- gingericha 5y ago
  And at one point even, google allowed you to directly search for someone's bacon number: https://www.wired.com/2012/09/easter-egg-google-connects-the-dots-for-bacon-number-search/ https://www.wired.com/2012/09/easter-egg-google-connects-the...
agucova 5y ago
In the course Introduction to Computer Science: AI (CS50AI) by Harvard, one of the first homeworks is implementing a search exactly like this with Python. It was extremely fun!
richrichardsson 5y ago
I've only ever heard of something similar, the Bacon Number, which is the degrees of separation between a given person and Kevin Bacon [1]. My Bacon Number is 2, having been an extra in Alexander, which featured Connor Paolo, who was in Mystic River with Kevin Bacon. [1] https://www.oracleofbacon.org/help.php https://www.oracleofbacon.org/help.php

StapleHorse 5y ago

I did something similar back in the uni days. However, one node was fixed to 'Chuck Norris' in order to do the search quickly. The first version with both random articles sometimes timeout the apache.

whiterock 5y ago

fails for me for: Linz (capital of Upper Austria) -> Brouwer‘s fixed point theorem Error: Whoops.

unobatbayar 5y ago

Tried "Mongolia" to "United States". My mind is blown; 222 paths with 2 degrees and the nodes look like an atom with a dark hole next to the nucleus.

jerryluc 5y ago

Shameless plug: I’ve made a small and stupid game where you’re presented Wikipedia articles and you have to guess which article is not linked to by any of the other articles. https://havarnov.github.io/oddoneout/ https://havarnov.github.io/oddoneout/

MrsPeaches 5y ago
Fun! Would be cool if clicking/taping the article titles would take you to the actual articles. Some interesting sounding ones popped up!

WGH_ 5y ago

I wish it could optionally ignore the info boxes and navbars. They kinda feel like cheating.