

XKCD Wikipedia Philosophy - BIackSwan

Wikipedia: 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". Via XKCD.
http://xkcd.com/903/
It works. Why?
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pzxc
I actually made a flash game a while back that lets you iterate this much
faster. ( <http://spu.co/get-to-philosophy> ) But in fact it often ends up at
Science much more than it does Philosophy. The trick is what things to
exclude, what links don't count as the "first link". Changing that parameter
radically changes what page you ultimately end up on. To answer your question
as to why it works, you should check out wikipedia's own page about the
subject -- <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Get_to_Philosophy>

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BIackSwan
Cool! Thanks! But does anyone know who came up with the observation first? Was
it Randall?

