Slashdot Mirror
The Wiki Game
Dan Smith writes "A new nerdy Internet activity recently popped up at Amherst College called the "Wiki Game". It works off of Wikimedia's amazingly popular electronic encyclopedia, Wikipedia. The Wiki Game is simple, doesn't require any registrations and gives your brain a thorough workout. Although the instructions suggest at least two people to play it, it's very easy to play solo. The instruction "manual" is (naturally) posted on Wikipedia:
The Wiki Game."
It's like six degrees of Kevin Bacon, but with general knowledge and 10 degrees. My friends and I used to play something like that where we would name two (mostly) un-related things, and someone would try to come up with the shortest trail from one to the other.
I would guess the winning condition might be to make it in less than 10 hops on the Wiki, since the second page it gives you is 10 random hops away... or you could have two people on laptops competing time-wise, without all the extra rules at the bottom about no back button, etc. You should be allowed to go back in head-to-head, as it only costs you time. Maybe even in single player, and just play against the clock. Otherwise you learn less.
To begin, a random page on the Wikipedia database is loaded (keystroke: Alt-X).
I've never heard of Alt-X before... it doesn't do anything on Safari. Is this some kind of weird shortcut I've never heard of before which seeks out and clicks the 'random' link of whatever page you're on?
Comment of the year
I wonder how long it will be before pages are vandalized to create quick "solutions" to the problem.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
You can win every time, regardless of how many pages you go through by simply using tab and enter to navigate. No clicky!
Bwahaha!*cough*
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
I either correct mistakes on sight on wikipedia taking directly from my brain and check afterwards if I was right and if the pages are corrected back, or try to introduce realistic looking fake data and check if I was spotted or not...those are games I can play alone !
Google passes Turing test : see my journal
people really like to overengineer their fun, it seems. I play the same game, and what I do is open a browser window, click random topic. Open another browser window, click randome topic. Now, the goal is to get from the article in one window to the article in the other window. No timing, no team play, just clicking. It's like solitaire.
When you get to the goal, just click random topic in one window and keep navigating to get to that topic. The game never ends.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
just like sex.
This is a bit sad, but back in my web developer days (this must have been 1998) I and a couple of colleagues played a similar game we called Find the filth.
;)
The idea was very simple. Everybody starts at a reletively "clean" site (big corporations or government agencies were normal targets). You were just allowed to click links - never use your bookmarks or type URLs in directly.
The first person to find porn won.
I don't think it ever took more than two minutes
May we live long and die out
Start at Yahooligans and see how many clicks it takes to get to a porn site. You can only click, you're not allowed to search.
Hint -- the beginner's method is to click on the "Terms of Service" link at the bottom of the page which features a convenient link to the real Yahoo. From there, it's easy. I consider that cheating, but whatever works for you.
once the developers with the automated path-finding tools suddenly start to win every single time.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
...with allmusic.com. Start at any artist/group, then think of a very different artist. Then see how few clicks on "Same personnel," "similar artists," "influenced by," etc you can make to get to that band. It actually tests your knowledge of music. Those who know more know which bands and artists are more likely to fill in the gaps.
Where's the Firefox extension that measures the 20 seconds and does the random link hopping and ereases the the history for those hops afterwards?
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
I always loved 6 degrees of separation, and i love wiki, truly a match made in heaven cool, i own the domain already. I've been thinking of a wikigame for a while now, i.e. actually programming/designing/compiling/testing/documentin g a computer game (or any other software) using only a wiki interface, pushing those open source paradigm boudaries to the anarchic limits. Will it work or just tie itself up in a big messy ball, it'll be fun finding out.
Sorry this was abit of a nothing post, but i needed to get it off my chest
"all through my house i set up traps, it seems like the rats have a map, so now i feed the rats crack" - Donald D
The "Random page link in the left navigation menu" links to the Wiki Main Page. The one in the Wiki Game Wiki works.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
It'd be neat if Wikipedia was compiling the data from this game--it'd provide some interesting stats that might give us some insight into the strange connections and intersections of the wikian's collective intelligence. I wonder what kind of bizarre graphs or images we could get by mapping out all the wiki pages attached to a single term. It's almost like that old psychological game of free association.