Extended Mind

Overview

http://xkcd.com/903 (xkcd comic #903) suggested that for any article on Wikipedia you can get to the article on Philosophy by clicking on the first valid 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".

Usage

run.rb

• Contains the core ExtendedMind class.
• For use as a library
• Or for use to find the trail of a single page
  • ruby run.rb Prolog

random.rb

• Pulls a new page from Wikipedia:Random and data logs the results.

analyze_data.rb

• Since there's actually a lot of data here, this script prints out (with colour!) various statistics.

Quick Data

Out of 2865 trails generated:
2281 out of 2865 pages reached Philosophy without recursing.
582 out of 2865 pages recursed before reaching Philosophy.
79.62% of pages reached Philosophy.
Zekoi survived the longest with 32 clicks before reaching Philosophy.
Cedar_bark_textile got to Philosophy the quickest with 4 clicks.
14.8 is the average number of clicks to reach Philosophy.
62 pages when clicked on will doom the trail to recursion.
Positivism caused recursion 312 times.

Special Thanks

• To dominikh for a quick and dirty YAML cache.