(95% of) All Roads Lead to Philosophy

[Lorizael]

Apparently this has been a thing for quite some time, but I just found out about it yesterday. If you go to a random article on Wikipedia, then click the first (non-italicized, non-parenthesized, non-external, non-intra-article, non-red) link in the article, and then repeat, your odds of eventually landing on the Philosophy article are the same as your odds of rolling a 2+ on a d20.

Fun fact: The Soviet Union loops back on itself and never leads to Philosophy.

[regexcellent]

First one I tried was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulina_%28Derventa%29 which looped between the serbian language and serbian alphabet.
e: science also loops back on itself
e2: I've tried three now, got in a loop with Greek language

My confidence in your statement is rapidly fading.

[Colonâ„¢]

Exactly the kind of entertainment we need on a Saturday night.

[regexcellent]

It's only 4pm here.

[Lorizael]

Science definitely leads to Philosophy and is one of the reasons why most articles lead to Philosophy. The chain is Science - Knowledge - Fact - Experience - Experiment - Hypothesis - Explanation - Set (mathematics) - Mathematics - Quantity - Property (philosophy) - Modern philosophy - Philosophy

[Lorizael]

Yeah, you're playing the game wrong, reg.

[Lorizael]

For example, your first link leads to Philosophy by way of Kulina (Derventa) - Village - Human Settlement - Geography - Earth - World - Human - Hominini - Tribe (biology) - Biology - Natural science - Science - Knowledge

[regexcellent]

Ah, I see.

[loinburger]

If you go to any article whose subject is a portmanteau (combination of two words, e.g. a spork is a combination of a spoon and a fork) or makes any reference at all to a word that is a portmanteau, then odds are that the portmanteau police have linked it back to the portmanteau article

[Lorizael]

Ah, I see.

YEAH. TAKE THAT.

[Hauldren Collider]

I'm curious what graph algorithm can be used to efficiently determine this stuff. I suspect if I poked through one of my books I'd find it, or thought about it long enough I'd realize it, but in the event someone here knows off the top of their head...?

Yes, there's an obvious naive solution (follow all the articles) but I'm guessing there's some matrix algebra way of analyzing this.

[Hauldren Collider]

Hm, I suppose once you generate the graph you can just find all of vertices connected to Philosophy.

[loinburger]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortest_path_problem#Algorithms

Incidentally, that article links to the Philosophy article with a path length of 3

Also, I pulled that number out of my ass

[Ben Kenobi]

Yes, there's an obvious naive solution (follow all the articles) but I'm guessing there's some matrix algebra way of analyzing this.

Start working in cat space.

[regexcellent]

Just use dijkstra's algorithm, that's what routing protocols typically do.