Looking at the result for others, mines doesn't look so good.<p>"Australian Recording Industry Association" to "National Register of Historic Places listings in South Carolina"
Time: 285.376 Seconds<p>Number of links visited: 16<p>The path you took:
[ "Australian Recording Industry Association", "Australia", "Oceania", "Region", "List of regions of the United States", "Grand Strand", "South Carolina", "Fort Sumter", "Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie National Historical Park", "National Historic Site (United States)", "National Register of Historic Places", "List of U.S. National Historic Landmarks by state", "List of National Historic Landmarks in South Carolina", "St. James Episcopal Church (Santee, South Carolina)", "National Register of Historic Places", "United States National Register of Historic Places listings", "National Register of Historic Places listings in South Carolina" ]
This is fun, we used to do something like this in high school called Five Clicks to Jesus, which is exactly what it sounds like.<p>I find this particular version a bit tedious because you aren't allowed to Find on a page. What good is having a timer if I can't go fast? Why punish me twice for reaching a dead end page by making me read the entire thing to discover that I need to go back?
So apparently it tracks pressing "CTRL+F", but it you select "find in page" from the menu in your browser that's fine. I guess there's no way for a website to track that anyway.
:-)<p>"Ditransitive verb" to "Paul the Apostle"<p>Time: 133.395 Seconds<p>Number of links visited: 10<p>The path you took:
[ "Ditransitive verb", "Grammar", "Linguistics", "Science", "Fall of the Western Roman Empire", "Edict of Milan", "Edict of Thessalonica", "Arianism", "Jesus", "Pauline epistles", "Paul the Apostle" ]
There was a good article from six degrees of wikipedia (<a href="https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/blog/search-results-analysis" rel="nofollow">https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/blog/search-results-an...</a>) which would show the ideal path and be cheating, but fun to compare optimal vs what was found.
I know some friends who would prefer to play this in their native language, so I can't wait for the i18n: <a href="https://github.com/wikispeedruns/wikipedia-speedruns/issues/438" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/wikispeedruns/wikipedia-speedruns/issues/...</a>
Reminds me of playing Prof. Robert West's implementation called "Wikispeedia" back in High School after AP CS Exams (and trying to call out anyone using the Find feature of their browser!) It's still playable here: <a href="http://www.wikispeedia.net/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wikispeedia.net/</a> which redirects here: <a href="https://dlab.epfl.ch/wikispeedia/play/" rel="nofollow">https://dlab.epfl.ch/wikispeedia/play/</a> but originally hosted here: <a href="https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~rwest/wikispeedia/project.php" rel="nofollow">https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~rwest/wikispeedia/project.php</a>. But its great to see folks are iterating on this concept further with a different UI and more features.
This is the random task I can't solve it. To go to the "Australian Plant Name Index" seems to be an impossible task.<p><a href="https://wikispeedruns.com/play/quick_play?prompt_start=Cleveland&prompt_end=Australian%20Plant%20Name%20Index" rel="nofollow">https://wikispeedruns.com/play/quick_play?prompt_start=Cleve...</a>
My first attempt already was rather easy, I even forgot to jump to my target on first article by using table of contents and instead manually scrolled down.<p>"Americans" to "Pop music"
Time: 54.945 Seconds<p>Number of links visited: 3<p>The path you took:
[ "Americans", "Culture of the United States", "Michael Jackson", "Pop music" ]
Easiest one so far: "Cricket" to "Economics", 5 links in 30 seconds via London.<p>Hardest: "Iceland" to "FIPS", 160 seconds because I spent way too much time looking for anything IT-related on Iceland's page, then decided to try the USAF link and got in through "command and control".
The tutorial says to swipe at the bottom of the screen and it does nothing. At “best” it scrolls if I happen to swipe where it hasn’t prevented scrolling. I didn’t click any links, a tutorial which advises me to take ineffectual action isn’t something I want to spend my time on.
The tutorial is infuriating. It tells you to do a thing, but then doesn't let you do it unless you click next, which isn't apparent.<p>If you tell a person to do a thing, you have to let them do it. If you want people to click the "next" button instead, you tell them to do that.
Here's another Wikipedia-related game: <a href="https://www.redactle.com/#" rel="nofollow">https://www.redactle.com/#</a><p>You have to guess what the title of the page is, with most of the words redacted. They are filled in as you guess.
I think this would have been a lot harder for the non hacker news crowd:<p>"Germans" to "Request for Comments"
Time: 63.447 Seconds<p>Number of links visited: 3<p>The path you took:
[ "Germans", "United States", "Internet", "Request for Comments" ]
If you want to see if your run could have been optimized, Six Degrees of Wikipedia is a neat tool for that.<p><a href="https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/</a>
Fun! I got lucky:<p>—<p>"Federal Information Processing Standards" to "Cuba"<p>Time: 38.630 Seconds<p>Number of links visited: 2<p>The path you took:
[ "Federal Information Processing Standards", "List of FIPS country codes", "Cuba" ]<p>—<p>Immediately searched by the string “countr” on the first page.
Oh man, this is a lot of fun<p>"Tamil language" to "Republican Party (United States)"
Time: 95.330 Seconds<p>Number of links visited: 9<p>The path you took:
[ "Tamil language", "Indian subcontinent", "United Nations geoscheme for Asia", "United Nations", "Member states of the United Nations", "United States", "List of states and territories of the United States", "Alabama", "Alabama Republican Party", "Republican Party (United States)" ]
This is a really amazing game.<p>"Architecture" to "1936 Summer Olympics"
Time: 123.123 Seconds<p>Number of links visited: 9<p>[ "Architecture", "History of Europe", "Ancient Greece", "Athens", "1896 Summer Olympics", "1900 Summer Olympics", "1904 Summer Olympics", "Olympic Games", "1948 Summer Olympics", "1936 Summer Olympics" ]<p>Im telling all my friends about this one!
Several years ago, to learn about machine learning, I wrote an algorithm that learnt what the best links in a Wikipedia article are to click in order to find the shortest route between two random articles. The answer was pretty much what you’d expect: top of the article, see also section at the bottom, first paragraph of each section, and then the rest of the article
Many years ago as a junior developer, some of the very first non-trivial Python code I wrote was an effort to do this programmatically. It was fun! I remember working on it over time, trying to make it faster and more clever. I learned a ton about graph traversal, parsing HTML outside a browser context, data structures for caching/memoization, and Python itself.
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.<p>-----<p>You found it!<p>Here's how you did:<p>"Diesel engine" to "Ethnic group"<p>Time: 19.686 Seconds<p>Number of links visited: 4<p>The path you took:
[ "Diesel engine", "Rudolf Diesel", "Second French Empire", "French people", "Ethnic group" ]
"John F. Kennedy" to "Chemical formula"<p>Time: 54.809 Seconds<p>Number of links visited: 7<p>The path you took:
[ "John F. Kennedy", "Harvard University", "List of Nobel laureates by university affiliation", "Nobel Prize", "Nobel Prize in Chemistry", "Chemistry", "Chemical equation", "Chemical formula" ]
Pretty cool! Some of these are very fun to think about, where to look to find the most likely connection and trying to come up with intermediate concepts that would likely link two thinks. Like linking "Analytics" to "Surrey" my first thought was "bank" since it's close to both Analytics and the UK.
My best run so far:
---
"BugGuide" to "Macintosh"<p>Time: 30.698 Seconds<p>Number of links visited: 6<p>The path you took:<p>[ "BugGuide", "Website", "Web browser", "Safari (web browser)", "Mac OS X Panther", "MacOS", "Macintosh" ]
Got lucky with this pair:<p>"Professor" to "Education in France"
Time: 66.789 Seconds<p>Number of links visited: 3<p>The path you took:
[ "Professor", "Tertiary education", "Secondary education in France", "Education in France" ]
Best run so far:<p>---
"Performative verb" to "Mammal"<p>Time: 41.101 Seconds<p>Number of links visited: 4<p>The path you took:
[ "Performative verb", "Verb", "Grammatical gender", "Human", "Mammal" ]
oh boy! I remember playing this game several years ago.<p>Here's how my run went:<p>"800 (number)" to "Video game"
Time: 155.120 Seconds<p>Number of links visited: 9<p>The path you took:
[ "800 (number)", "Factorial prime", "Integer", "C (programming language)", "Operating system", "Computer program", "Programmer", "Flight simulator", "Space flight simulation game", "Video game" ]
I've found the trick for these - unless a more obvious/direct path exists (eg. you get two somewhat related topics) is to try and find the Nazis first. I tried to go from Arabic to Science/Mathematics but that didn't pan out so pivoted to the Nazis which were only 3 degrees of separation away.<p>----<p>"Grammatical tense" to "Scientific method"
Time: 150.046 Seconds<p>Number of links visited: 9<p>The path you took:
[ "Grammatical tense", "Arabic", "List of languages by total number of speakers", "Language shift", "Anti-German sentiment", "World War I", "Nazism", "Pseudoscience", "Science", "Scientific method" ]
"Impersonal verb" to "September 11 attacks"<p>Time: 101.131 Seconds<p>Number of links visited: 5<p>The path you took:
[ "Impersonal verb", "English language", "United States", "List of states and territories of the United States", "New York City", "September 11 attacks" ]