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Kevin Bacon Meets Wikipedia With New Pathfinding Program
New submitter BLT2112 writes "Inspired by the Oracle of Bacon, the Oracle of Wikipedia finds the shortest path between two Wikipedia articles, as in Wikipedia Golf. As explained in the site, 'One selects one article as the tee and another article as the hole and then completes the course between them clicking as few links as possible. No typing is allowed. . . . The Oracle also allows you to search for the most challenging potential Wikipedia Golf courses. Can you find a longer course and merit a place in the "records" section?'"
Haw can I post a more useful post than "First Post!" if the site shown is already slashdotted?
When did Wikipedia get its own golf course?!
... after seeing that Godwinning was too easy, I asked the Oracle of Bacon how many links to Jesus Christ.
The Oracle cannot find "Jesus Christ."
Won't someone Save this Oracle?
--
BMO
Taking any two random pages on the Internet and making both inaccessible.
I'll wait till Slashdot goes away.
There have to be islands that never touch each other unless you cheat by going to the main page and hitting "random page".
How would you get, for example, from "World of Warcraft" to "Lose one's virginity"?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Save Jesus instead. It's not a good idea to save Oracle after the Google clash (http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120516083919975).
I'd love to figure out a way to visualize the paths to the universal attractor that is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy.
Obligatory XCKD ... errr, SMBC...
http://xkcd.com/214/
If we place the longest golf paths in the records section, it would no longer be the record holder. One could just click on the records page, then click on the final page.
Of course, as soon as any two articles get identified as being far apart in this game of golf, someone will edit the articles to mention this fact, thereby reducing their distance to 1. Quite the paradox!
Can't get to the Slashdotted page, but this does sound like it could have been an interesting online phone game. Two people each pick a Wikipedia entry. Then both search for the path between them ( with some agreement on origin/destination ). The game itself keeping track of the number of steps.
Of course a site that automatically traces the path ruins this. It would probably also result in people salting pages with links to more generic ones.
Amazing! I've been doing something similar for over 15 years; I even call it kanji golf. I wrote a program that displays all the Japanese kanji and allows me to click on one. Using this kanji it then shows me a list of all the nimoji (2 character words) that contain my kanji and another target nimoji that does NOT contain my kanji. By clicking a character in the nimoji list, I'm presented with the list of nimoji containing that kanji. This goes on until I find the target. Scores are based on the number of paths, and the program learns the easy ones and is biased for new or difficult targets. At any point along the way the meaning of a kanji character or a nimoji can be displayed. However, these requests cost points.
This little game really helped me learn to read and write Japanese quickly (not to mention my C skills).
Wikipedia is a generous gift to society from everyone who has donated their time or money, and this seems like a waste of their resources... probably both during the playing of the game, and whatever spidering is needed to set up the courses. I have to look at Jimbo's face often enough as it is.
Oblig. alt-text on this one: http://xkcd.com/903/
Meh, wikigolf involves too much effort. I think it's more interesting that, if you just click the first link in each article, you'll eventually get to philosophy. (Go ahead and try; random page, and click the first (non-namespaced/non-disambiguation/non-external) link.)
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
They've just ruined that fun game we all learned off XKCD!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation#Facebook
I tried it at the time; it worked.
You owe the Oracle three and a half beeeellion dollars.
That's not doing it in 3, because two of the people involved were fictional characters in movies - i.e. imaginary.
So actually you beat 3; you did it in 2i + 1 = a Knight's move, of magnitude sqrt(5).
This reminds me of a 2008 Slashdot article covering a web application made by a Trinity College Dublin student: Six Degrees of Wikipedia - Slashdot
I'm the creator of the site. (I apologize that it was down for so long today - I had to do some tweaking to handle the Slashdot effect. Hopefully we're out of the woods now, but we'll see.) Would people be interested in the source code? I'd be willing to clean it up and post most or all of it under a permissive license if there's interest.
No route ?
Wow... This proved to be the time-waster-of-the-week so far here.
From Astrophysics to Mosquitoes
From Mongol Empire to Benzine
From Love to Planck Constant
Thanks to this (and a couple of beers at lunch), I'm highhandedly responsible to a couple of percentage points of productivity lost this afternoon.
From -Rick Santorum- to -sanity : WTF is "Kaqf", and how is that linked to sanity?
Clearly the Oracle is also a Fudgemaster.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
Longest one I've found so far is hilum to Angkor Borei and Phnom da. Definitely a great time-waster.