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Friday, January 2, 2009

«From Obama to The Game»

It's the Wikipedia game. You click the random article link to go to a random article on Wikipedia. Only following links within Wikipedia articles starting with your randomly chosen article, you start jumping from page to page trying to get to a final, predetermined article. Also, you're not allowed to use the Categories links that are found at the bottom of some articles. Often times the predetermined objective is the article on Adolf Hitler.

That got too easy, because there's links to Germany scattered all around Wikipedia (and the article on Germany has a link to the article on Adolf Hitler). So A friend and I decided to try the article on The Game (mind game) as the objective (by the way, you just lost). Much more difficult... At least the first time through.

Basically, we found a link path through Barack Obama's Wikipedia page.

  1. Barack Obama
  2. Harvard Law School
  3. Harvard University
  4. The Game (Harvard-Yale)
  5. The Game (disambiguation)
  6. The Game (mind game)
After we found that, it became too easy again, because all you had to do was find the article on the United States and you could easily track back to Obama (and thus, The Game).

The problem is now, whenever I think of Obama I also think about The Game. I think I've just increased the frequency of my "The Game" losses...

I'm convinced that you can follow links from anything to anything in Wikipedia. Give it a try. It may take some creativity or outright random guesses, but it's possible. I forget what our random article was when we started, but clicking a link to Obama was just a random guess.

3 comments:

  1. The original article was Saint (song).

    If I remember right we ended up going to the drug abuse article from our starting point then ended up in the executive branch article somehow. Then the Obama idea came up.

    ReplyDelete
  2. 7 hops from Disk encryption software (starting random location) to The Game(mind game). I cheated a bit. I went to The Game (mind game) to check what linked to it.

    ReplyDelete
  3. @ Trevor: Yeah, that was it.

    @ Looney: Nothing wrong with that. Cheating would be if you had a Wikipedia account and edited articles so they link to each other.

    ReplyDelete

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