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Show HN: Most Wikipedia articles lead to the same loop
- ksmiley 14y agoI can't replicate it, but I encountered a weird bug. I entered "Star Trek" and hit Enter. The suggested items list appeared and I clicked on "Star Trek". Page titles appeared as normal, but everything appeared twice, like so: Star Trek Star Trek Cinema of the United States Film Cinema of the United States Recording Data Level of measurement Film ...etc until the last page title, "Reality" Seems like two processes were running in parallel and outputting to the same stream.
- xiaoma 14y agoI also got a weird one: Anime Animation The page you specified doesn't exist
- aptwebapps 14y agoThat's funny because the first link on the Animation page is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion Is that an Easter Egg (illusion == doesn't exist)?
- lotyrin 14y agoSame thing here, also from Animation.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- mildweed 14y agoEpistemology reigns supreme.
- eevilspock 14y agoHow do you know?
- encoderer 14y agoThis is beautiful. I've always thought sites like IMDB and Wikipedia are hypertext expressions of the purest form. As a nerdy kid, over a few years I read my way through a significant chunk of the early 1990's Groliers Encyclopedia set my Grandma bought me at Krogers. And it was never cover-to-cover reading, instead it was filled with hopping around, page-to-page, volume-to-volume. Start at oscilloscope, but what's a cathode ray? And then it's in television? How does broadcasting work? I'd sit on the floor with a half dozen open encyclopedias open around me, the same way we can do now with browser tabs. Wikipedia has many flaws, but it's a fantastic tool and I'd have killed for it as a 12 year old with 5 volumes of an encyclopedia in my backpack!
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoAh yes. To me (to my productivity's detriment...) quite often when I visit Wikipedia it becomes a learning adventure. From one thing you can hop to the other, finding out all sorts of interesting and obscure things. To a curious mind like mine, Wikipedia is heaven!
- pattern 14y agoFor myself, I would broaden this and say that almost every link I visit on HN, or every forum post I read leads to more than 1 additional link. Thus three windows of Chrome open with 10+ tabs each :) I find this drill-down effect to be quite illuminating, if not productive. Strangely, it seems to provide both depth and breadth of topics in relatively equal measures.
- dbh937 14y agoSometimes, I go onto wikipedia just to find out one fact... and end up with 6 or 7 tabs open on the topic, ranging from genetics to Judaism.
- prezjordan 14y agoI played with this [1] when I first started programming in Ruby. The results were super interesting (but now I regret not using the Wikipedia API...) [1] https://gist.github.com/1654064 https://gist.github.com/1654064
- seangransee 14y agoabout an hour after posting this, someone changed the philosophy page so the philosophy-reality loop doesn't happen. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy it still brings you to a loop, but it's not an immediate back-and-forth between the last two.
- anvandare 14y agoWikipedia is aware of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Get_to_Philosophy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Get_to_Philosophy
- scotttobejoking 14y agoAs they describe in the page, when you describe something, you are trying to place it within a general framework. In trying to describe a domain in an encyclopedia, it does little good to use language specific to the domain. If your reader doesn't know what Biology is, it's little use trying to describe it in terms of Microbiology and Immunology. You have to use more general language. There are are few words more general and meaningless in our language than "organization". edit - grammar
- seangransee 14y agoi know. when i found that out, i spent half the day on wikipedia trying it out with different pages. so i built a way to automate it :)
- pavel_lishin 14y agoSeems like it would be nice to cache some of these requests, instead of repeatedly hammering the Wikipedia API. And why is it grabbing images? http://i.imgur.com/KSju9.png http://i.imgur.com/KSju9.png (Incidentally, my test case for the screenshot did not lead to Philosophy!)
- seangransee 14y agototally agree. i hacked this together pretty quickly last night. definitely a lot of room for improvement. thanks for the feedback!
- bloaf 14y agoIt looks like there is a bug where it doesn't fetch the correct page: http://wikiloopr.com/anime http://wikiloopr.com/anime
- seangransee 14y agofixed
- tripzilch 14y agosorry to say, but couldn't you have thought about that before posting it on HN? you're on the front page, if your site really runs without caching, you must be wasting an enormous amount of WP's resources.
- sixQuarks 14y ago"Honda" only goes 3 links
- seangransee 14y agoi guess i could modify it to not include bold links. notice why it's stopping there... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_company http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_company
- tomelders 14y agoAs does London, but it's a proper loop.
- stigi 14y agohttp://wikiloopr.com/home http://wikiloopr.com/home Home - Residence - Home
- sp332 14y agoAs far as I know, this was noticed in May last year on the xkcd forums. http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=71309 http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=71309 There's a writeup of it with a gigantic picture over here: http://www.mrphlip.com/wikiphilosophy/ http://www.mrphlip.com/wikiphilosophy/
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- tonylampada 14y agoSeems like there is an even older link here on HN http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2584896 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2584896
- sp332 14y agoOK, and this game http://spu.co/get-to-philosophy http://spu.co/get-to-philosophy was played at least as far back as August 2010.
- rolux 14y agoTrue, the "wikipedia loop" itself is not a new discovery. But still, congrats for coming up with a nice GUI to demonstrate it!
- Aldor 14y agohttp://wikiloopr.com/texting http://wikiloopr.com/texting Yay! FInally found one that doesn't work.
- DanBC 14y agoThat loops between philosophy and preposition.
- calvinlough 14y agoFor me it loops between Human and Reason.
- sp332 14y agoIt's been modified since then. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Text_messaging&action=history https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Text_messaging...
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- shootthemoon 14y agoVery first try, The Eiffel Tower, oddly enough, leads to Great Britain
- joelverhagen 14y agoWhen images appear first in the page's source, the wrong link is chosen. I assume you are trying to go for the first link, as a human reader would see it. For example, the page on Anime: http://wikiloopr.com/Anime http://wikiloopr.com/Anime http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anime&action=edit http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anime&action=e...
- seangransee 14y agothanks! gonna fix that later
- fasteddie31003 14y agoThis reminds me of a game I used to play as an intern with other interns to kill time. Someone would pick a Wikipedia article deep down in the bowels of Wikipedia and we would race to the article from Wikipedia only using links. We could get the article surprisingly fast, most within only 5 intermediate page visits from the homepage.
- jahewson 14y agoI quite like the loop between Doubt and Belief http://wikiloopr.com/Doubt http://wikiloopr.com/Doubt
- guac 14y agoThe loop found for "Psychology" is pretty neat: http://wikiloopr.com/Psychology http://wikiloopr.com/Psychology Edit: Looks like somebody is editing certain articles that don't have philosophy as the first link to have it. Psychology used to loop with itself through like 5 intermediates.
- tomelders 14y agoShakespeare - 28 links. My personal best.
- menacingly 14y agoHow does that get there slower than "fart" ??
- incision 14y agoMAF [1] - 30. Though, it's a bit of a cheat since the first page is surely disambiguation. I also found M62 Locomotive [2] at 26 to be interesting. 1: http://wikiloopr.com/MAF http://wikiloopr.com/MAF 2: http://wikiloopr.com/M62%20locomotive http://wikiloopr.com/M62%20locomotive
- stevesearer 14y agoGorgonzola achieved 43 - http://wikiloopr.com/Gorgonzola http://wikiloopr.com/Gorgonzola
- zyb09 14y agoNobody linked xkcd yet? Relevant Alt-Text: http://xkcd.com/903/ http://xkcd.com/903/
- TapaJob 14y ago"Greg James" As in Radio one DJ.....Doesnt work!
- tg3 14y agoInterestingly, Paul Graham [1] leads to the photographer, but still leads back to the Web before heading to philosophy/proposition. [1] http://wikiloopr.com/Paul%20Graham http://wikiloopr.com/Paul%20Graham
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoIt's funny, but it's true that everything in life ultimately leads back to philosophy. As noted by XKCD, everything is based on something else: http://xkcd.com/435/ http://xkcd.com/435/ And I think after Maths on that should come Philosophy.
- bloaf 14y ago"Nematode" and "Flow (psychology)" stop at "psychology" which I think is just another example of that discipline putting on airs.
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoThat's changed now, thanks to me.
- user24 14y agoI agree. Thought that at the time. Was a philosophy student at the time too though.
- rane 14y agoI don't think the loop is the interesting part, what's interesting is that articles lead to philosophy.
- Bjoern 14y agoBangkok is 25 and Chopsticks loops with itself.
- drewmclellan 14y agoKeith Chegwin gets stuck in Great Britain, which is probably for the best.
- api 14y agoEither philosophy is a dead end, then, or it is the base of all knowledge. Depends on whether knowledge is a tree or a graph, which is... a philosophical question! My brain exploded.
- beala 14y agoIf there is some characteristic Q that is true of all knowledge, then Q must be true of Q. A cycle!
- Cushman 14y agoOnly if Q is knowable.
- jlgreco 14y agoTrees are connected acyclic graphs, so knowledge could be both. ;)
- tsahyt 14y agoYes but graphs can very well be cyclic, so eventually a path from a node could lead back to the node itself.
- lbarrow 14y agoFrom a mathematical perspective, this is actually not that surprising. Think of the act of clicking the first link in the Wikipedia article as a function that takes in the page you're on and outputs another page. If you call this function on itself over and over again (ie use the output of one step as in the input of the next step), you will eventually enter a loop. The proof of this is simple: there are only a finite number of Wikipedia articles, therefore you must eventually reach an article you've seen before. (This is the same reason systems with a finite number of states cannot be chaotic.) Since it's necessarily true that all articles will eventually reach a loop when you iteratively click the first link, we have to ask: how unusual is it that they usually reach the SAME loop?
- jfoutz 14y agoAfter the first few runs, i'm kinda surprised it's not a fixed point at Philosophy.
- madcaptenor 14y agoBack in May of 2011, it was. http://ai.stanford.edu/~west1/attractor.html http://ai.stanford.edu/~west1/attractor.html
- prawks 14y agoNever thought about it as a finite state system, but that's a great way of looking at it.
- klawed 14y agoAgreed. I'd love to know how many different cycles the wikipedia article graph contains. If most articles lead to 1 out of 20 possible cycles, it's much less interesting than if it's 1 out of 5,000,000.
- momotomo 14y agoI've been looking to do something like this with the Networkx library in Python, though on an internal company MediaWiki with a much smaller article base. Going to try to visualise much the same thing, the major loops and cliques in the graph.
- njharman 14y agoI love wiki. I spend hours following links. Having loops is a feature or else I might never stop. Greek City States -> Polis City Human settlement Statistics Data Level of measurement Stanley Smith Stevens United States Federalism Politics Art Human behavior Behavior Organism Biology Natural science Science Knowledge Fact Proof (truth) Argument Philosophy Problem Doubt Belief Proposition loops to Philosophy
- zerostar07 14y agoIn another time it would lead to "God"
- johnbender 14y agoThis may be hyper naive but is this the consequence of beginning most articles representing the current topic as a more specific form of another topic? For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebra http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebra "Algebra ... is a branch of mathematics." (mathematics being a link) So if you continue to generalize you'll end up at the most general subject which appears to be philosophy. [update] added an example
- jlgreco 14y agoThat seems like a very reasonable assumption. I just randomly sampled a dozen or so articles and they all followed that theme.
- dude_abides 14y agoah so thats why the degree is called Doctor of Philosophy?! Thanks for the enlightenment! I've wondered quite a lot of times why I'm a Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science, and not Doctor of Computer Science.
- tomjakubowski 14y agoI get that this is tongue-in-cheek, but philosophy as in "Doctor of Philosophy" doesn't refer to the field of philosophy per se, but to the more general concept of "love of knowledge."
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- csomar 14y agoNot sure why you are getting down votes, but checking over Wikipedia confirms your comment In the context of academic degrees, the term "philosophy" does not refer solely to the field of philosophy, but is used in a broader sense in accordance with its original Greek meaning, which is "love of wisdom". In most of Europe, all fields other than theology, law and medicine were traditionally known as philosophy. The doctorate of philosophy as it exists today originated as a doctorate in the liberal arts at the Humboldt University of Berlin, and was eventually adopted by United States universities, becoming common in large parts of the world in the 20th century.[1] In many countries, the doctorate of philosophy is still awarded only in the liberal arts, which is known as "philosophy" in continental Europe.
- leh0n 14y agohttp://wikiloopr.com/Gate%20City%20Bank http://wikiloopr.com/Gate%20City%20Bank I think this one is bugged haha
- strongriley 14y agoI think I beat it... http://wikiloopr.com/Caterham%20CSR http://wikiloopr.com/Caterham%20CSR
- wowfat 14y agoTry this http://wikiloopr.com/kumbanad http://wikiloopr.com/kumbanad
- chrishas35 14y agoSomeone just changed the Reason page [1] which is now putting the focus on Biology instead of Philosophy. 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Reason&oldid=510134116 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Reason&oldid=5...
- manish_gill 14y agoI remember someone on reddit posting a python script that does the same thing (following the wiki chain to Philosophy). Amusingly, my test got stuck in a loop between Science and Natural Science. :)
- freejoe76 14y agoStrangely, http://wikiloopr.com/Tacos http://wikiloopr.com/Tacos takes you to a different loop than http://wikiloopr.com/Burritos http://wikiloopr.com/Burritos
- seangransee 14y agoclearly burritos are the more logical thing to eat
- andrewmunsell 14y agoI got stuck in a philosophy-argument loop instead of philosophy-reality ;)
- BlackJack 14y agoWhat happens for Biology? http://wikiloopr.com/Biology http://wikiloopr.com/Biology. For me, it goes down until it gets to Biology, and then highlights Biology over and over. Biology Natural science Science Knowledge Fact Proof (truth) Argument Philosophy Problem Doubt Belief Proposition Logic Reason Human Mammal Class (biology) Biological classification Organism Biology The first link on the Wikipedia page for Biology is "Biology(disambiguation)", but the first textual link is "Natural Science". I assume it loops on Biology because it keeps going back between Biology (the article) and Biology (disambiguation), but that doesn't explain why the first redirect is to Natural Science in the very beginning. Am I just missing something here? Edit: This no longer happens. Now it properly loops on Philosophy and Proposition.
- twodayslate 14y agoI thought Wikipedia hates sites like this. The do more harm than good.
- dakimov 14y agoWikipedia is a dense oriented graph, no wonder it has many cycles. What's the big deal?
- m3mnoch 14y agoi started with "The Tyger" and got this: The Tyger William Blake Romanticism Industrial Revolution United Kingdom Britain (placename) Great Britain shrug apparently, william blake is indisputable. m3mnoch.
- PuercoPop 14y agoNice demo, but I think it is an incorrect asumption that the first link is to a broader subject. For example, for Perú it says: "It is bordered on the north by Ecuador and Colombia, on the east by Brazil" So Perú->Ecuador left me with a big wtf.. http://wikiloopr.com/Peru http://wikiloopr.com/Peru
- kromped 14y agohttp://wikiloopr.com/Antidisestablishmentarianism http://wikiloopr.com/Antidisestablishmentarianism
- 001sky 14y agoIn fact, according to a crawl of the Wikipedia database from May 2011, nearly 95% of Wikipedia articles will take you back to Philosophy. - Always interested in the backstory of folks that sit around thinking this stuff up (and then testing it). http://www.syndiosocial.com/the-philosophy-of-networks/ http://www.syndiosocial.com/the-philosophy-of-networks/
- jdpage 14y agoInterestingly, things like "Hat", "Shoe", and "Human" end up in a Psychology/Emotion loop, rather than the Philosophy loop.
- dirtyaura 14y agoAfter having twenty tries that got me into the philosophy loop, I started to think what are the most basic concepts that philosophy is "made of". Maybe I could escape the loop that way? And lo and behold, I tried word "word" and it loops between "emotion" and "psychology". http://wikiloopr.com/word http://wikiloopr.com/word
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoI fixed that.
- dirtyaura 14y agoSo did you edit Wikipedia to ensure the Philosophy loop?
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoYes.
- ralfd 14y agoNow it loops between "Human" and "Reason". I think there are two secret cabals at work. One to break the Philosophy link and one to thwart these evil schemes.
- Evgeniuz 14y agoThe first word I tried — jeans — and it failed to make philosophy loop :) Apparently, any articles from generated list will fail too.
- crazypyro 14y agoJeans made the philosophy loop for me? http://i.imgur.com/rgMkh.png http://i.imgur.com/rgMkh.png
- Evgeniuz 14y agoSomehow there was Emotion/Psychology loop there. Now it goes even further, than yours image, the loop is Argument/Philosophy now. Clearly, wikipedia is changing or tool was enhanced :)
- usea 14y agoHere is a similar visualization of the phenomenon from last year http://xefer.com/wikipedia http://xefer.com/wikipedia
- creamyhorror 14y agoThis is a superior visualisation in my opinion - it actually builds you a tree of links as you enter subsequent searches. Quite interesting to see how article chains cluster into 3 or 4 different "main branches".
- ianstormtaylor 14y agoExcept there's no autocomplete. I couldn't match Carly rae jepsen... but once you get it, it is much cooler.
- sageikosa 14y agoAnd if you go to the last link in any regular paragraph (not footnotes nor tables, nor references) you may often end up bouncing around sports teams.
- JohnsonB 14y agoThis behaves erratically. Sometimes it considers the coordinates link, above the entire article the "first link" (in the "Michael Phelps" chain), sometimes not (Chicago). Consequentially, I believe "Michael Phelps", when the coordinate link is ignored, leads to it's own loop that is not the philosophy loop in question.
- hoprocker 14y agoPuts me in mind of Translation Party[1] (which is back up, kudos to WillC and Rick!). There's a lot to be entertained via this sort of vertex-following algorithm. [1] http://translationparty.com/ http://translationparty.com/
- joshaidan 14y agoFunny... As I was playing with this, somebody changed the order of: "In philosophy and sociology..." On the Agency (philosophy) page. This changed the output of the results, but in the end the loop still existed. However, I couldn't help but feel like someone is trying to hack the matrix.
- clemesha 14y agoI have a site: http://TheWikiGame.com http://TheWikiGame.com that makes a game out of a related idea (finding the connection between Wikipedia articles). Recently, I've been giving access to the game data to people (like university researchers, etc) to test different theories on path connections made by real people, etc. The game has now been running for over 3 years, has about 1.19 million players, playing over 1.37 million games, with about 1.22 million won games (successful start/end article connection). Got a really cool application for all the game data? I'd love to hear: alex@thewikigame.com
- loumf 14y agoMaybe the interesting part is the 150,000 lost games.
- lachenmayer 14y agoSurely most of those are just abandoned games?
- ajryan 14y agoI have a kind of Wiki game that I play aloud with friends. Person A names a topic. Person B must guess whether Wikipedia owns the top Google (incognito/not signed-in) result for that term. Person B gets a point for guessing right, or Person A gets a point if Person B guesses wrong. The fun is in coming up with "stumpers.'
- joshaidan 14y agoOh, I think I found one that doesn't loop: Port Arthur http://wikiloopr.com/Port%20Arthur http://wikiloopr.com/Port%20Arthur Either that, I found a bug.
- rogerbinns 14y agoNot as dramatic but http://wikiloopr.com/Nelson http://wikiloopr.com/Nelson ends up with Great Britain (and then claims it loops to itself with no intermediaries).
- TillE 14y agoLooks like a bug. Dalian should lead to Liaoning.
- seangransee 14y agoyesterday, the loop was always the same. since this made it to the top of hacker news, the loop has been changing. look at the revision history of some of those pages and you'll see that people on wikipedia are messing with the loop.
- kevinh 14y agoI seem to have broken it here: http://wikiloopr.com/List%20of%20minor%20planets:%2075001%E2%80%9376000 http://wikiloopr.com/List%20of%20minor%20planets:%2075001%E2... Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minor_planets:_75001%E2%80%9376000 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minor_planets:_75001%E2... That is, however, a weird Wikipedia page. It seems like the first link is a target to another location on the page, which (I'd assume) would put it in an infinite loop.
- planckscnst 14y ago"Egypt" also breaks.
- dewarrn1 14y agoInteresting find: "Sherlock Holmes" avoids the Argument/Philosophy loop; "Poirot" does not.
- dkroy 14y agoAre there any major articles that don't loop?
- seangransee 14y agomaybe not major, but the ones i've found so far that don't do it are http://wikiloopr.com/home http://wikiloopr.com/home http://wikiloopr.com/chopsticks http://wikiloopr.com/chopsticks http://wikiloopr.com/monty%20python http://wikiloopr.com/monty%20python
- seangransee 14y agoalso, anything that leads to marriage http://wikiloopr.com/dating http://wikiloopr.com/dating
- CodeCube 14y agoThis is the shortest one I've found so far - http://wikiloopr.com/monty%20python http://wikiloopr.com/monty%20python
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- seangransee 14y agohere's the shortest one i've found: http://wikiloopr.com/home http://wikiloopr.com/home
- RyanMcGreal 14y agoWorks for: * Carly Rae Jepson * Paul is dead * Telephony * Easter Island * Drum and bass * Sunglasses * CAT 5 * Willy Wonka * Black hole * Vancouver * Cloud Cuckoo Land * Bacon * Radish * Brunette * Dunning-Kruger Effect * Lady Gaga * Sailor Moon If the chain hits Philosophy first, it converges on Philosophy/Argument. If it hits Fact first, it converges on Fact/Truth.
- fchollet 14y agohttp://wikiloopr.com/whale http://wikiloopr.com/whale "Whale" leads to the "pinniped"/"marine mammal" loop. How about that one?
- d4nt 14y ago"HTML5 Canvas" gets into a loop on Truth ... Fact ... Truth. Not the usual philosophy loop.
- milkshakes 14y agoironically, starting at "strange loop" avoids the repetitive philosophical argument
- pdx 14y agoThat works because somebody is being funny, and created a self referential strange loop inside Wikipedia. That's a good find you found. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_loops http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_loops
- sp332 14y agoHofstadter was a genius, one of his books was called "I am a Strange Loop" and xkcd (jokingly) reported that his autobiography reads: I'm so meta even this acronym
- RenierZA 14y agoHere it is: http://xkcd.com/917/ http://xkcd.com/917/
- johanbev 14y agoI have to admit guilt here :-) Nice that someone found it too. +1 for GEB.
- pooriaazimi 14y agoYou have a bug. Pages like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc. (note the dot at the end) have a "geographic coordinate system" link at the top, that isn't part of the article. So queries like http://wikiloopr.com/Steve%20Jobs http://wikiloopr.com/Steve%20Jobs are actually returning wrong results.
- bandwevil 14y agoYep, it's seeing the "Coordinates" link at the top right corner of the page.
- seangransee 14y agothanks! I'll go ahead and fix it.
- dhughes 14y ago"Lies" doesn't work.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- steeleduncan 14y agoI wonder if this says more about the people who write the articles or the nature of the subjects themselves?
- ErrantX 14y agoGuys :) This is always fun when it crops up - especially the musing on how deeply rooted the topic of philosophy is. But please don't go editing articles to improve the loops or otherwise change them. Unless of course the change is beneficial to the article. It's like going for a walk somewhere fascinating; enjoy the view, but leave nothing behind :)
- DesaiAshu 14y agoDoes this hold true with following the xth link on the page? I'd predict it does, but the further x is from 1, the longer the average chain before you get to the loop (by virtue of definitions being at the top of wiki articles, then at some point the average length would hit a consistent level). Would love to see this modified to let you determine x.
- wkral 14y agoYou could optimize this a bit by caching the loops, I noticed some pauses between Fact and Truth, seeing as how that loop always comes up it would be nice to cache it.
- SHITMAN 14y agoI really want to find the longest route from A to Hitler now...
- tantalor 14y agoFirst two I tried led to different loops: 1. Elephant (Mammal ... Human) 2. Big Bang (Fact ... Truth)
- zapt02 14y agoTIL Wikipedia has a JSON API!
- dinedal 14y agoLooks like http://wikiloopr.com/Crystal http://wikiloopr.com/Crystal breaks it (The loop has no other end)
- seangransee 14y agoRight now it appears to be looping between Natural Science and Physics. But they're really far apart so you might not seem them on your screen at once.
- pitchups 14y agoI think this works for any link, not just the first link.
- DelvarWorld 14y agoPseudodiarrhea gave me a unique loop.
- ThisIBereave 14y agoOne of these, at least, is supported by a pretty weird edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Reason&diff=510188633&oldid=510134116 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Reason&diff=51...
- godDLL 14y agohttp://wikiloopr.com/Sigur%20Rós http://wikiloopr.com/Sigur%20Rós did I break it?
- jamescun 14y agoWe used to play this as a game back in high school. First one to find the loop won.
- INTPenis 14y agoSame but at the boring callcenter job I had at the time. Dell Enterprise support, we would get virtually no calls sometimes and we would make up shit to find on wikipedia and whoever found it from a specified starting point in the least amount of jumps won.
- bayesbiol 14y agoWikiRaces! https://twitter.com/wikiraces https://twitter.com/wikiraces
- scurvyscott 14y ago"booger" doesn't do it. Just sayin.
- pohl 14y agoHere's one that - if executed on the Federation computer on board the Starship Enterprise - would make smoke and sparks fly from the terminal... http://wikiloopr.com/Reince%20Priebus http://wikiloopr.com/Reince%20Priebus
- JacobIrwin 14y ago'television' was the first search term I could find that broke the loop - on the fifth or sixth attempt
- zerop 14y agoAll roads lead to Mathematics answers it -- http://www.xamuel.com/all-roads-lead-to-mathematics/ http://www.xamuel.com/all-roads-lead-to-mathematics/
- svdad 14y agoI think this is fairly trivially explained in most cases by the fact that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Almost by construction, nearly every article starts with "X is a Y" (modulo grammatical niceties) where Y is a more general class to which X belongs. In cases when the article doesn't follow that form, the first linked term is usually still explanatory or definitional in some sense and hence more general, and cases where that doesn't apply (e.g. Obstacle) are unusual enough that they don't generally break the cycles. There are no "Wikipedia axioms" that I know of, so this is pretty much guaranteed to end in a cycle looping through a limited set of terms used to talk about abstract concepts. Hence Philosophy.
- urza 14y agoFew days ago, when this was on MainPage, it ended in different loop than now. Today most articles ends in cycle between Philosophy and Modern Philosophy.. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_philosophy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_philosophy ) few days ago, it was cycling between Philosophy and Agency ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency_(philosophy) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency_(philosophy) ) What changed and why?
- urza 14y agoAha, someone changed the first link on page Problem from purpose to obstacle. Its a little bit like butterfly effect :) http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Problem&action=history http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Problem&action...