
Inspired by XKCD:903, Wikipedia steps to philosophy - HistoryInAction
http://ryanelmquist.com/cgi-bin/xkcdwiki
======
joshklein
This is no joke: 21 clicks from Kevin Bacon to Philosophy. Welcome to the
Internet equivalent of a child repeatedly asking, "why?"

~~~
sophacles
This shows a that the program linked is broken. The steps taken, are:

1\. Animal House 2\. ....

Going to the actual Kevin Bacon Wikipedia page, Animal House is clearly
italic. The First non-italic, top-level (wrt parens) is Golden Globe

~~~
chad_oliver
I expect the program is working off an out-of-date database. Hitting wikipedia
directly would be rather bad form.

------
chrislloyd
A few years ago at Railscamp in Australia, Andrew Grimm proved this exact
outcome. His code is here: <https://github.com/agrimm/philosophy-dump-parser>
and <https://github.com/agrimm/philosophy-navigation>.

------
camtarn
Hah. The hypothesis is false, but the script already has that covered via loop
detection... nice :)

panhard

    
    
        Auverland
        Panhard
    

uh oh... found a loop

panhard -> auverland -> panhard.

So far the longest trail I've found, at 25 steps, was from 'ED209' via
pottery, through minerals, states of matter, knowledge, finite sets,
mathematics... that's one heck of a wikitrail.

[edit] Scratch that, 'Horst link' is longer via one step, going via transport,
commerce, San Juan de Dios Market, Mexico, Romance languages, Precambrian,
Chronology, etc...

~~~
iopuy
30 for "Howard Hughes"

uh oh... found a loop

mathematics -> quantity -> property_(philosophy) -> modern_philosophy ->
western_europe -> europe -> continent -> landmass -> landform ->
earth_sciences -> science -> knowledge -> fact -> information -> finite_set ->
mathematics.

~~~
kd0amg
_modern_philosophy - > western_europe_

Looks like "philosophy" is the first link on the "Modern philosophy" page (and
was last week when I first tried this).

[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Modern_philosophy&...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Modern_philosophy&oldid=430354556)

~~~
ceejayoz
I wonder how many Wikipedia edits this week are going to be to undo loops.

~~~
kd0amg
Me, I'd be more inclined to create them >_>

------
6ren

        recursion
    
           1. Recursive
           2. Recursion
    
        uh oh... found a loop
    
        recursion -> recursive -> recursion.

~~~
Spikefu
Recursion, self-similar, mathematics, quantity, property, modern philosophy,
philosophy

Assuming you don't include the links in the "lacks inline citations" box on
the recursion page.

------
conradev
Theres a Wikipedia page on it, it works on 93% of all articles.

<http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Get_to_Philosophy>

~~~
lostbit
Yes. It dates back to 2008. Interesting that someone got bugged by it that
time and just now it took this dimension.

------
nickolai
XKCD

    
    
        Webcomic
        Comics
        Graphic
        Visual_perception
        Visible_light
        Electromagnetic_radiation
        Energy
        Physics
        Natural_science
        Science
        Knowledge
        Fact
        Information
        Sequence
        Mathematics
        Quantity
        Property_(philosophy)
        Modern_philosophy
        Philosophy
    

19 steps to philosophy

~~~
billpaetzke
I wonder if we could say everything leads to science. I also reached
philosophy via science.

Ratko Mladic (randomly chosen from wikipedia homepage)

    
    
            Army of Republika Srpska
    	Military
    	Use of force
    	Conflict resolution
    	Negotiation
    	Dialogue
    	Literature
    	Fiction
    	Narrative
    	Latin
    	Italic languages
    	Indo-European languages
    	Language family
    	Language
    	Human
    	Taxonomy
    	Science
    	Knowledge
    	Fact
    	Information
    	Sequence
    	Mathematics
    	Quantity
    	Property_(philosophy)
    	Modern_philosophy
    	Philosophy

~~~
toponium
emacs doesn't traverse through science but does hit computer science

    
    
        emacs
        text_editor
        software_application
        computer_software
        computer_program
        instruction_(computer_science)
        computer_architecture
        computer_science
        information
        sequence
        mathematics
        quantity
        property_(philosophy)
        modern_philosophy
        philosophy

------
albertsun
I tried it with Iraq, but the page parsing is slightly wrong. Got this result.

Iraq Arabic_language Languages Human Precambrian Eon_(geology) Chronology Time
Measurement Magnitude_(mathematics) Property_(philosophy) Modern_philosophy
Philosophy 12 steps to philosophy

But the link to Arabic is in parentheses. The first non-parenthesesed link is
to Western Asia.

------
p4bl0
An article[1] from the Xamuel.com's blog predates the xkcd stripe by a few
days and states the sames things but with mathematics instead of philosophy.
Also their's some fun with second links.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2573038>

~~~
araneae
And the version using philosophy appeared on Reddit before the comic as well:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/hgwbe/on_wikiped...](http://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/hgwbe/on_wikipedia_all_roads_lead_to_philosophy/)

------
bena
Two problems. It favors links in the sidebar over article links. I was in
"Human" and your script picked out Pre-Cambrian when it should have been
Taxonomy.

Second, capitalization matters. It couldn't find "the black keys" but it found
"The Black Keys".

It's pretty obvious in hindsight when you think about it. You start with
something specific and then get more and more vague until you hit Philosophy.

------
orblivion
It totally worked for me, I tried it with Sausage and Cradle of Filth. I
thought it was a joke, it blew me away.

But then I found that "Osama Bin Laden" crossed "philosophers" and then ended
on a loop between "reason" and "rationality".

EDIT: I just tried "Osama Bin Laden", the steps it takes seems to be using a
slightly different Wikipedia than I see.

~~~
bad_user
I tried OOP, eventually arriving at Philosophy -- OMG, it works :))

------
shawndumas
That's 'cause Philosophy covers it all:

"Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those
connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language."
--<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy>

~~~
lloeki
Too bad there's no Philosophy in <http://xkcd.com/435/>

~~~
davidcuddeback
Especially since a common path is to reach philosophy by first visiting the
mathematics page:

    
    
      Mathematics
      Quantity
      Property_(philosophy)
      Modern_philosophy
      Philosophy

------
lloeki
Wow, someone just modified Modern Philosophy (now first link is Western
Europe), Science and/or Knowledge pages, which makes most previously things
tried by me kick into a 25 loop. I'm wondering if it's intentional.

~~~
hugh3
Most things were getting stuck in a loop around "Indo-European languages" last
time I checked. Someone is definitely playing silly buggers.

I was tempted to see whether I could somehow engineer an all-roads-lead-to-
goatse situation, but I couldn't think of a plausible pathway.

~~~
eru
Just hijack Philosophy.

~~~
hugh3
Too easy. The idea was to create an entirely plausible pathway of links that
nobody could complain about individually (so they wouldn't get reverted) which
nonetheless eventually led to http:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/goatse

~~~
eru
I mean, create that plausible pathway with philosophy as its root. Since so
many articles already lead to philosophy, it's a good starting point.

------
Fargren
You don't reach Philosophy from Philosophy.

~~~
malvim
Hey, I did!

Did it using the software and then checked wikipedia by hand:

Philosophy -> Existence -> Sense -> Organism -> Biology -> Natural_science ->
Science -> Knowledge -> Fact -> Information -> Finite_set -> Mathematics ->
Quantity -> Property_(philosophy) -> Modern_philosophy -> Philosophy

15 steps to philosophy

~~~
dkersten
The "Quantity" article did not contain the link to Property_(philosophy)
before and it was added purely for the sake of this game. See the talk page
for more details.

Personally, I think its sad that people are editing wikipedia purely for the
sake of making games work out.

------
clemesha
Related: <http://TheWikiGame.com> (I built this app, it's made with using
django, xmpp, and almost every datatype that Redis provides)

------
docmarionum1
Modern Philosophy now goes to Western Europe rather than Philosophy. And since
everything seems to go through that, nothing will reach philosophy anymore.

------
blago
I did this a while ago with node.js: <http://blago.dachev.com/wikidrill>

------
mbubb
Fun

Interesting that the first three i tried took about 17 hops and got funnelled
through the "Life" entry.

corndog sensimilia halitosis

This took a few less hops and stayed in 'techne': voip.

Would love to see these searches graphed.

Years ago - one of my favorite sites was Everything2 (still up) - it was run
on the slashdot engine. The fun of it was to follow the associated links at
the bottom of the entry to see where it would take you.

~~~
oldminer
Slashdot used to link to Everything (back before it was Everything2) as a sort
of instant-dictionary for tech terms. Stories would have something like "RSS
2.0(?) and Atom(?) proponents are squaring off..." with the question marks
going to the relevant Everything node. Most of the time, the terms wouldn't be
defined until the story went live, and then they would be in short order.

It was a neat symbiosis, especially back before Wikipedia existed. However,
they were separate sites. Both Slashcode (which runs Slashdot) and the
Everything Engine (which runs Everything2) are written in Perl. Everything was
never run on Slashcode, though, AFAIK.

------
tobylane
I just spent about 20 minutes trying to get anything more than 20.

Wikipedia has the answer, as to not spoil here's a link.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Get_to_Philosophy#Cha...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Get_to_Philosophy#Chains)
I like the last loop on the article not crossed out.

~~~
jrockway
Wikipedia:Get_to_Philosophy is not what xkcd is describing, though. That page
seems to allow any link to be chosen. xkcd says, "click on the first link in
the article text not in parentheses or italics".

For example, Wikipedia:_Get_to_Philosophy provides the example, Optimum "L"
filter -> Butterworth filter. But the first link in 'Optimum "L" filter' is
"Athanasios Papoulis".

------
hencq
Nice tool :-) It seems to also take words between parentheses though I think.
For example on <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceland> I would expect it to
follow European not Icelandic.

------
jrockway
Ironically, it doesn't work from "Spark Plug".

~~~
assemble
Strange, it did for me yesterday.

Edit: Modern Philosophy seems to be missing the link to Philosophy, which
should be there according to the edit history
([http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Modern_philosophy&...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Modern_philosophy&diff=next&oldid=430354556)).

~~~
gnoupi
Apparently some kid was having fun vandalizing the page to break this. The
page is semi-protected now, so it should be ok from now on.

------
stcredzero
Funny, but the attractor for Conservapedia seems to be "nation".

<http://www.conservapedia.com/Nation>

I suspect that's also one of the most common non-stop words on "The Colbert
Report".

------
hamner
By extension, you also will always end up at ... Existence Sense Organism
Biology Natural_science Science Knowledge Fact Information Finite_set
Mathematics Quantity Property_(philosophy) Modern_philosophy

------
mtodd
Bastard beat me to it!

Friend of mine was graphing out all of the connections (using Graphviz) and
found some interesting patterns. Ultimately you can say the same thing for
"Science", "Knowledge", and even "Mathematics".

------
deltasquared
Found a loop: Start at Reiki

reiki spiritual_practice spirituality reality being eastern_philosophy
islamic_philosophy islamic_studies islamic_history history george_santayana
madrid spain balearic_islands catalan_language uh oh... found a loop

spain -> balearic_islands -> catalan_language -> spain .

So this game is traversing a cyclic graph. It should be possible to get around
this by keeping track of visited links, and not repeating our clicks.

Now is Wikipedia a connected graph?

------
vacri
'music', 'art', 'war' are examples of non-esoteric terms that don't end up at
philosophy.

'libertarianism' doesn't end up at philosophy either :)

Though I'm noticing that even before 'mathematics', all my meme-true queries
are going through 'science'

also... 'philosopher' doesn't go through via the script page, but on the
actual wiki it's redirected straight to 'philosphy'.

Fun page, nice work.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Are you sure you're doing it right?

music -> art -> sense -> perception -> awareness -> consciousness -> mind ->
panpsychism -> philosophy

war -> conflict -> social behaviour -> physics -> natural science -> science
-> knowledge -> facts -> information -> sequence -> mathematics -> quantity ->
property -> modern philosophy -> philosophy

~~~
vacri
I'm just going off what the linked page gives me.

music

    
    
        music
        dance
        art_form
        senses
        perception
        eastern_philosophy
        islamic_philosophy
        islamic_studies
        islamic_history
        history
        george_santayana
        madrid
        spain
        balearic_islands
        catalan_language (loop to spain)
    

war

    
    
        war
        military_history (loop to war)
    

it seems that the script in the main article isn't using the same pages we are

~~~
InclinedPlane
The tool is broken. It's picking up links from the side bar instead of from
the main article, since those links show up in the source first.

------
cjzhang
It's not funny if you edit the articles and remove links to force it to be
true.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Set_%28mathematics...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Set_%28mathematics%29&action=historysubmit&diff=431041716&oldid=427973404)

------
moconnor
It seems to take a while to search; are you querying wikipedia each step
instead of a DB snapshot?

~~~
tim_iles
Last time I downloaded Wikipedia, it was 4.5GB. If I were to knock up this
hack, I would definitely scrape pages instead.

~~~
blahedo
On-demand page scrape + memoisation is almost certainly a win here. Even if
thousands of people are hitting this, a lot will choose some of the same
queries (I'm sure Kevin Bacon and xkcd and philosophy are in there a bunch),
especially in the tails of the paths (Latin, Mathematics, ...)

------
hypest
That "Wikipedia Trivia" is really intriguing! Manually tested and verified it.

~~~
Deestan
I know I'm being pedantic here, but I'm pretty sure you haven't verified it.
To do that, you would have to visit every Wikipedia article.

------
alanfalcon
I'm quite surprised at how many steps it takes to get from Isaac_Newton to
Philosophy (31). I'd expected that would be a quick one. I guess that's just a
quirk of the "first link" rule though.

~~~
shekmalhen
Justin Bieber: 18 steps. I don't know if it is a good thing or not.

------
VengefulCynic
The current version appears to dislike unicode characters.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petar_Dobrovi%C4%87> causes an error.

------
dspillett
Excellent. Saved me some clicking resulting in more efficient use of
procrastination time!

I hit loops a few times - you could drop to the second link in those cases
instead of stopping completely.

~~~
eru
If you drop out of loops, you will reach every article eventually. (Unless you
are ending in a cul de sac.)

~~~
dspillett
If the draw to "philosophy" is as string at it seems you should end up there
without scanning too many articles. You'd need some sort of fixed cap to avoid
the few cases where you'd end up scanning thousands of articles, of course.

------
jimmyjazz14
Appears you almost always get there via Mathematics though.

------
riffraff
I find fascinating that if you end up on "Mathematics_education" than you have
no chance of getting to "philosophy". (or "physics" is enough, apparently)

------
joejohnson
Can anyone find a path that doesn't end with:

    
    
        ...
        Mathematics
        Quantity
        Property_(philosophy)
        Modern_philosophy
        Philosophy

~~~
garyrichardson
Barrack Obama:

barrack_obama List_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States
United_States_Constitution Supreme_law State_(polity) Social_sciences
Field_of_study Academia Community Interacting Action_(philosophy) Philosophy

------
SeoxyS
Xkcd succeeded in making me waste 20min yesterday clicking links on Wikipedia
checking whether it was actually true. I wish I had had this tool then!

~~~
Deestan
On the other hand, would you have spent less than 20 minutes playing with the
tool?

------
mildweed
<http://ryanelmquist.com/cgi-bin/xkcdwiki?title=xkcd>

------
joshmaker
From my limited clicks, it seems like both science and mathematics are even
faster to get to in this method than philosophy.

------
michaelleland
1)ruby_on_rails 2)Open_source 3)Philosophy

------
bluekeybox
I tried and I end up in an infinite loop between science, philosophy,
knowledge/epistemology, and language.

~~~
Sukotto
"philosophy" is the halting condition

------
meatsock
the routes should be affected not by selecting the first link on the page but
a weighted probability based on the number of clicks each link on the page
gets to the other in-subject links in the body.

also sometimes it counts links in sidebars as first, i think that's
unintentional.

------
iamdave
____SPOILER ALERT __ __*

Douglas Adams is not 42 links away from Philosophy, sorry :(

~~~
jrgnsd
Does this mean the world is about to be blown up by the Vogon's?

------
VMG
_Sequence_ , _Information_ and _Fact_ seem to be big attractors

~~~
stcredzero
I wonder what the attractors are for Conservapedia?

------
Fuzzwah
Why does searching for cannabis just reload the page? I do admit that when it
came back and the text entry box was empty I'd already forgotten what I was
trying to search for. It wasn't until the next joint when I thought of trying
it again that I recalled it had happened previously.

------
chanux
I got stuck in an infinite loop starting from Firefox.

------
selectnull
And xkcd itself is "18 steps to philosophy"...

~~~
thalur
I don't think it works correctly though... it uses "Author" as the first link
whereas the first link in the text of the article is "webcomic" ("Author" is
in the summary pannel on the side)

<https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Xkcd>

~~~
lloeki
The same happens for cities or locations, where there is usually a
"Coordinates" in the upper right corner. Still, I did it manually in text
bodies, and you eventually end up to Science or Mathematics, which leads to
Philosophy.

------
jordaninternets
It worked when I tried it with Power Rangers.

------
ctdonath
Anyone try generating a map of Wikipedia?

------
andrewflnr
Hmm, doesn't work for cryovolcanism.

------
zyfo
This image shows how things end up in Philosophy, by XKCD forumite arotenbe:
[http://forums.xkcd.com/download/file.php?id=29727&mode=v...](http://forums.xkcd.com/download/file.php?id=29727&mode=view)

Looking at these stats shows how viral this meme/trivia got:

<http://stats.grok.se/en/latest/Philosophy>

<http://stats.grok.se/en/latest/Mathematics>

<http://stats.grok.se/en/latest/Reason>

I posted these stats on a FB status a couple of days ago because of the sudden
spike. Now that sudden spike looks small compared to today's sudden spike.
Funny how there's different levels of viral, almost akin to different levels
of infinite. What would happen if this hit mainstream media?

~~~
joejohnson
On that chart, Greeks points to to other pages. How can Greeks have two first
links?

~~~
SoftwareMaven
That was my question, too. There doesn't seem to be a disambiguation that
would apply, either. "Greek Language" shouldn't point to "Indo-European
languages", it should point to "Greeks". I can't figure out how that went
wrong, either, but it is interesting to see a cycle in an acyclic graph. :)

------
ignifero
_As of 2008, the center of English Wikipedia is the article 2007. From that
article, it takes on average 3.45 clicks to get to any of the 2,111,479
articles reachable from it. Disregarding all of the articles that are just
lists, years or days of the year, the "real article" closest to the center is
United Kingdom, at an average of 3.45 clicks to anywhere else._

from
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation#Wikip...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation#Wikipedia)

~~~
JonnieCache
_> the "real article" closest to the center is United Kingdom_

I find this absolutely fascinating. Consider that the reason we're at the
centre of the world map is because we had the power to choose to put ourselves
there, at the point in history when the maps were being drawn.

Is that imperial influence, long since waned, still echoing across the years,
visible in the wikipedia graph?

~~~
ignifero
OR, it's just because they used the English wikipedia for it

~~~
JonnieCache
Hah, good point. I wasn't trying to be triumphalist, though I admit it
certainly reads that way.

------
klbarry
I got stuck on loops each time I tried it, and figured he made it up. Damn.

------
gizzlon
15 stepf from Philosophy to Philosophy ..

what are the implications?

------
ck2
Also try turning off spell check or writing something significant on paper and
see how well we do these days.

~~~
camiller
Actually spell check, has made me a better speller. Of course in the old days
when the apple ][ dominated the personal computer space you had to save your
word processing file, exit the word processor, switch floppy disks, start the
spell checker, switch the disk for the dictionary disk, run against your file,
approve/reject suggested changes, save the file, exit the spell checker,
switch to the floppy disk with the word processor on it, start the word
processor load your file, find the things the spell checker flagged as wrong
but couldn't find a correct word for and fix those.

Seriously, it was just easier to get better at spelling.

