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Everything! Under Six Clicks Away…

Posted by Jason in May 27th 2008

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Everyone it seems at some point or another… in some form or fashion… has heard of Kevin Bacon’s 6-degrees. If you haven’t… let me give you a quick catch up:

Basically every thing and everyone (in this case actors and Kevin Bacon) can be related within six degrees of separation. Let’s take for example my friend Sean’s, friend Billy’s, friend Thomas. Thomas and I have 2 degrees of separation… Sean and Billy. Well, today there was an article on Slashdot about a guy Stephen Dolan who has taken this six degrees of separation to Wikipedia. Apparently every so often, Wikipedia makes available a compressed XML download of all their articles. Well Stephen took this download, stripped it of content other than links and wired up a database so that everything could be related.

***Before you read any further… let me warn you… this is highly addictive

Visit Stephen Dolan’s site or use the search below to enter any two things that are covered in wikipedia… dogs, cats, unicorns, america, watches, clouds, jungles, chairs, elephants, planes, thunderstorms, (…) you get the idea… and you will see the least amount of links possible to get from one category to the other. Most of the time I get three links, sometimes I get four links, once I got five links… but five links is the most I have seen.

My five links looks something like this…
From: Timex
-> Timex Social Club
-> Rapping
-> Detroit, Michigan
-> Heroin
To: Yawn
5 clicks needed

I challenge you to find two categories that need 6 links… or more! It is addictive, you have been warned!

Best of luck (if by some crazy weird chance you have iframes disabled… the search below won’t work and you will have to go here.)