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Comment by tristor | Hacker News Reader

This was interesting, this was the last one I did. Reminds me of the "Degrees of separation" rule on Wikipedia that any article is within 5 or 6 clicks of something about WW2.

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You found it!

Here's how you did:

"Diesel engine" to "Ethnic group"

Time: 19.686 Seconds

Number of links visited: 4

The path you took: [ "Diesel engine", "Rudolf Diesel", "Second French Empire", "French people", "Ethnic group" ]

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Also reminds me of how if you click the second link of a Wikipedia article (and the second link of every subsequent page) you'll always end up on Philosophy

More info on this? Unless I'm misunderstanding something, in my own test, this isn't true. You can hit loops, e.g. the page for Russia goes to Eastern Europe which goes back to Russia.

Knowledge also forms a loop going from: Knowledge -> Procedural knowledge -> Descriptive knowledge -> Knowledge.

I just tried it from a random page and thought it was going to work when I hit "knowledge", but ended up with a loop too. I think it's more of a truism than actual provable fact.

I think it might be provable that you'll eventually hit a loop.

EDIT: I suppose one disproof would be the existence of articles that don't have a second link.

'Wikipedia trivia: if you 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".'

Stems from https://xkcd.com/903/ alt-text. Might not be the original source, but that's where I know it from.

Wikipedia, unsurprisingly, has a page on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Getting_to_Philosoph...

Which, ironically, doesn't work for that page. You end up in a loop rather than getting to philosophy.

It worked for me? Either something changed in the past five minutes or one of us messed up. I did the first link as the article mentions, not the second. That could also be the issue.

This is what I end up with: https://imgur.com/a/iz1166B

At "Branches of science" it links back to "Formal science".

Keep in mind, you need to click on "first non-parenthesized, non-italicized link" in the article text itself.

My mistake. On my second time at "formal science," "science" was an already clicked hyperlink, and the dark blue is really close to black on my phone causing me to miss it.

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