Sunday, 4 June 2017

Rabbit hole challenge

Six degrees of separation anyone?  Before The Blob there was bobthescientist who posted occasionally on another forum. in 2012, I picked up a link on Metafilter and started a hare running on QI-talk about people's Bacon-Erdos-Sabbath number. This is asking the question: who is the smallest number of steps from

  • Being co-author of a paper with Paul Erdős AND
  • Being cast in a film with Kevin Bacon AND
  • Playing on stage with Black Sabbath

But that is sooo yesterday. Today's challenge is to go to Wikipedia's Random Article and see who can get to Ireland , or indeed France, in the fewest clicks. When Dau.I tried this just now she drew Chagga Languages in the lottery and got home in four steps:


I would hazard a guess that Everywhere in Wikipedia is less than 4 clicks away [3 with a perfectly efficient algorithm?] from Anywhere else in that tiny 'Universe': 5.4 million articles is much less than the 7 billion people of six degrees of separation.



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