Wikipedia Speedruns | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia Speedruns

wikispeedruns.com

318 pointsmahami97 comments

"Chromosome" to "BBC One" Time: 78.910 Seconds

Number of links visited: 10

The path you took: [ "Chromosome", "DNA", "Life", "Animal", "Systema Naturae", "Carl Linnaeus", "Chelsea Physic Garden", "Chelsea, London", "United Kingdom", "BBC", "BBC One" ]

This is pretty sick.

Damn. So I just lost one.

I needed to go from 700 to “Australasian Virtual Herbarium”.

Getting from 700 to South Australia or Adelaide is no big deal. The problem is trying to find a single Wikipedia page that actually links to the Wikipedia page for the Australasian Virtual Herbarium rather than to their website (or just referencing it without any link text).

I suppose I could go in somewhere and add it myself, but that would be cheating. So after 670 seconds, I’m throwing in the towel on this one. If anybody finds a way, let me know, but I may take a crack at this one again later this evening.

I used "What Links Here" to find this (just to confirm that it can be done, not that I could find it myself). ROT13:

uggcf://ra.jvxvcrqvn.bet/jvxv/Nhfgenyvn

uggcf://ra.jvxvcrqvn.bet/jvxv/Pnaoreen

uggcf://ra.jvxvcrqvn.bet/jvxv/Nhfgenyvna_Angvbany_Obgnavp_Tneqraf

uggcf://ra.jvxvcrqvn.bet/jvxv/Nhfgenynfvna_Iveghny_Ureonevhz

I would probably not have been able to find this without using the reverse link feature.

So it is possible, just very very challenging. I haven’t plugged it into a translator and it’s been a while since I deciphered ROT13 by hand, but looking at that first one I’m guessing that’s Australia itself just based on the pattern?

Country pages tend to have a lot of links to a lot of different topics. So if it’s on that page, that’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack, and it may not even be obviously labeled to begin with since link text can be anything on a MediaWiki.

If anyone wants to make a go at this and post their time and link count here, I may have some free time this weekend to try and challenge it. None this evening I’m afraid.

I got a slightly shorter path through William Astbury

Chromosome,DNA,William Astbury,London,United Kingdom,BBC,BBC One

Oouf. This game is fun for trivia

"Voiceless bilabial plosive" to "Rotten Tomatoes"

Time: 98.637 Seconds Voiceless bilabial plosive,English language,African-American Vernacular English,Tupac Shakur,Nothing but Trouble (1991 film),Rotten Tomatoes

"Computer network" to "Niger" Time: 257.660 Seconds

Number of links visited: 3

The path you took: [ "Computer network", "Internet Assigned Numbers Authority", "Time zone", "Niger" ]

Looking at the result for others, mines doesn't look so good.

"Australian Recording Industry Association" to "National Register of Historic Places listings in South Carolina" Time: 285.376 Seconds

Number of links visited: 16

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" ]

Reminds me of the Wiki Game: https://www.thewikigame.com/

I was surprised to see this so low, the Wiki Game is a great version of this as you compete directly against others.

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.

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?

I think it's an interesting restriction. The one thing I object to is not having sources and especially "See also". Most of the time I can get things within 10 clicks even with the restrictions.

We had the same game but we were trying to find Hitler... I don't know what that says about my school

We definitely had this too haha

This was a fun one:

---

"Domain name" to "Creative Commons license" Time: 90.194 Seconds

Number of links visited: 8

The path you took: [ "Domain name", "Website", "Adobe Flash Player", "Browser game", "Free-to-play", "Freemium", "Open source", "Creative Commons", "Creative Commons license" ]

https://wikispeedruns.com/quick_run/finish?run_id=72581&play...

"New Delhi" to "Marseille"

Time: 64.282 Seconds

Number of links visited: 6

The path you took: [ "New Delhi", "Capital city", "Cantons of Switzerland", "French language", "Northern France", "France", "Marseille" ]

https://wikispeedruns.com/quick_run/finish?run_id=73745&play...

Very cool. My first go was similar:

"West Virginia" to "Austria-Hungary"

Time: 50.962 Seconds

Number of links visited: 8

The path you took: ["West Virginia", "United States", "North America", "Continent", "Eurasia", "Europe", "World war", "World War I", "Austria-Hungary" ]

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.

I kind of like that as an accidental element of the game. It takes real time to click the menu twice to pull up the box and then still type the phrase, etc. Reasonable chance you can find it faster by scrolling and scanning. Gotta choose.

Assuming the finds trigger the scroll updates, one might be able to infer certain large jumps (possibly looping as one often does) to be a search in the page.

:-)

"Ditransitive verb" to "Paul the Apostle"

Time: 133.395 Seconds

Number of links visited: 10

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" ]

This is the next olympic sport.

"National Collegiate Athletic Association" to "Myanmar"

Time: 63.695 Seconds

Number of links visited: 6

The path you took: [ "National Collegiate Athletic Association", "Student athlete", "Amateur", "Olympic Games", "International Olympic Committee", "Thailand", "Myanmar" ]

I find it much more interesting to play by fewest links clicked. Having a timer running is too much pressure.

Agreed - feels like fewest links requires more thought and less manic clicking.

Have you tried... Marathon mode? Conserve your clicks but take your time

Haha, loving it. "Gastropoda" to "Basque language" Time: 111.094 Seconds

Number of links visited: 5 [ "Gastropoda", "Taxonomy (biology)", "Ancient Greek", "Language family", "Language isolate", "Basque language" ]

Also, I challenge everyone to break this record: "History of Christianity" to "University of Cambridge" Number of links visited: 2 [ "History of Christianity", "University of Oxford", "University of Cambridge" ]

There was a good article from six degrees of wikipedia (https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/blog/search-results-an...) which would show the ideal path and be cheating, but fun to compare optimal vs what was found.

Also, there's this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Getting_to_Philosoph...

I know some friends who would prefer to play this in their native language, so I can't wait for the i18n: https://github.com/wikispeedruns/wikipedia-speedruns/issues/...

I remember calling this Wikipedia Golf.

Haha, we used to call it Wikipedia Racing.

I think Golf is the “fewest clicks” variation. I haven’t played the “least time” version, but it seems fun too!

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: http://www.wikispeedia.net/ which redirects here: https://dlab.epfl.ch/wikispeedia/play/ but originally hosted here: https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~rwest/wikispeedia/project.php. But its great to see folks are iterating on this concept further with a different UI and more features.

This is an awesome game that I played many years ago with friends. I think this is an amazing way to reconnect with friends and just have fun at times

Another good one in a similar vein is https://www.geoguessr.com/ — Guess where you are in the world from a random location by hopping around through unlabeled Google Streetview data

This is the random task I can't solve it. To go to the "Australian Plant Name Index" seems to be an impossible task.

https://wikispeedruns.com/play/quick_play?prompt_start=Cleve...

Cleveland,Canada,North America,Northern Hemisphere,North,South,Australia,Flora of Australia,Nothofagus,Plants of the World Online,International Plant Names Index,Australian Plant Name Index

Cleveland,List of sovereign states,Australia,Flora of Australia,Eucalyptus,Eucalyptus camaldulensis,Australian Plant Census,Australian Plant Name Index

It is harder than it needs to be because the Taxon Identifiers at the bottom of the page of plant species is missing from the wikispeedruns rendering of the page. That box seems to pretty consistently link to APNI.

The bottom box is against the rules, as well as "See Also" and sidebars. Links from the article text only. Wikispeedrun just renders it without the rulebreaking sections.

There's also some common house rules. No ctrl+f and no back button are fun.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikirace

For me ..... Cleveland,United States,Flag of the United States,National flag,Royal Standard of the United Kingdom,Commonwealth realm,Australia,Biodiversity action plan,Biodiversity,Global Biodiversity Information Facility,Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG),Global Biodiversity Information Facility,Biodiversity informatics,International Plant Names Index,Australian Plant Name Index

Interesting game! Not being able to go backwards makes it much harder.

It took me a very long time, but I eventually found it by going through (abbreviated) botany -> taxonomic database -> Encyclopedia of Life -> Atlas of Living Australia -> CSIRO -> Australian National Botanic Gardens -> Australian Plant Name Index.

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.

"Americans" to "Pop music" Time: 54.945 Seconds

Number of links visited: 3

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.

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.

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: https://www.redactle.com/#

You have to guess what the title of the page is, with most of the words redacted. They are filled in as you guess.

See also https://redactle-unlimited.com/ if game-play feels too restrictive. For those not familiar, the original Redactle author went MIA for several months (TLS certificate expired, no contacts), and in the interim many people shifted to Redactle Unlimited, at least judging by the Reddit group. Redactle.com seems to have finally come back, and I still prefer it over Redactle Unlimited, but I figured it's worth mentioning. The latter makes it easier to count letters, and automatically fills in plurals and related forms--it can be infuriating when you realize you forgot the plural of a word you tried 200 words ago, and then proceed to immediately solve it. (For me most games are between 50-150 words.)

I think this would have been a lot harder for the non hacker news crowd:

"Germans" to "Request for Comments" Time: 63.447 Seconds

Number of links visited: 3

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.

https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/

Fun! I got lucky:

—

"Federal Information Processing Standards" to "Cuba"

Time: 38.630 Seconds

Number of links visited: 2

The path you took: [ "Federal Information Processing Standards", "List of FIPS country codes", "Cuba" ]

—

Immediately searched by the string “countr” on the first page.

So you cheated. You are not allowed to use the browser find tool.

Nah, he just ran the any%.

If you're not cheating, you're not trying.

> You can't use the browser find tool.

From the rules.

D’oh! Missed that.

I’m sure the number of links would have been the same, but it would take much longer…

Without using the browser find tool I suddenly realize it's nothing like how I usually use Wikipedia. I have to scan a lot differently to find what I'm looking for. I'm not sure if that's a positive or negative thing, since arguably using the find tool biases what we read toward what we want to see rather than something objectively true.

For someone who didn't exactly excel in chemistry, this was rough:

"Automotive industry" to "Pi bond" Time: 145.773 Seconds

Number of links visited: 13

The path you took: [ "Automotive industry", "Industry (economics)", "Product (business)", "Raw material", "Foundry", "Hydrogen gas porosity", "Hydrogen", "Diatomic molecule", "Molecule", "Chemical bond", "Bond length", "Molecular geometry", "Covalent bond", "Pi bond" ] 145.77300000000002

Oh man, this is a lot of fun

"Tamil language" to "Republican Party (United States)" Time: 95.330 Seconds

Number of links visited: 9

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.

"Architecture" to "1936 Summer Olympics" Time: 123.123 Seconds

Number of links visited: 9

[ "Architecture", "History of Europe", "Ancient Greece", "Athens", "1896 Summer Olympics", "1900 Summer Olympics", "1904 Summer Olympics", "Olympic Games", "1948 Summer Olympics", "1936 Summer Olympics" ]

Im telling all my friends about this one!

"Synonym" to "Cantons of Switzerland" Time: 79.737 Seconds

Number of links visited: 10

The path you took: [ "Synonym", "Morpheme", "Linguistics", "Language", "Language family", "Indo-European languages", "Germanic languages", "German language", "Swiss Standard German", "Switzerland", "Cantons of Switzerland" ]

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.

-----

You found it!

Here's how you did:

"Diesel engine" to "Ethnic group"

Time: 19.686 Seconds

Number of links visited: 4

The path you took: [ "Diesel engine", "Rudolf Diesel", "Second French Empire", "French people", "Ethnic group" ]

Also reminds me of how if you click the second link of a Wikipedia article (and the second link of every subsequent page) you'll always end up on Philosophy

More info on this? Unless I'm misunderstanding something, in my own test, this isn't true. You can hit loops, e.g. the page for Russia goes to Eastern Europe which goes back to Russia.

Knowledge also forms a loop going from: Knowledge -> Procedural knowledge -> Descriptive knowledge -> Knowledge.

I just tried it from a random page and thought it was going to work when I hit "knowledge", but ended up with a loop too. I think it's more of a truism than actual provable fact.

I think it might be provable that you'll eventually hit a loop.

EDIT: I suppose one disproof would be the existence of articles that don't have a second 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".'

Stems from https://xkcd.com/903/ alt-text. Might not be the original source, but that's where I know it from.

Wikipedia, unsurprisingly, has a page on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Getting_to_Philosoph...

Which, ironically, doesn't work for that page. You end up in a loop rather than getting to philosophy.

It worked for me? Either something changed in the past five minutes or one of us messed up. I did the first link as the article mentions, not the second. That could also be the issue.

This is what I end up with: https://imgur.com/a/iz1166B

At "Branches of science" it links back to "Formal science".

Keep in mind, you need to click on "first non-parenthesized, non-italicized link" in the article text itself.

My mistake. On my second time at "formal science," "science" was an already clicked hyperlink, and the dark blue is really close to black on my phone causing me to miss it.

"Magazine" to "Periodical literature" Time: 1.113 Seconds

Number of links visited: 1

The path you took: [ "Magazine", "Periodical literature" ]

"John F. Kennedy" to "Chemical formula"

Time: 54.809 Seconds

Number of links visited: 7

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" ]

I clicked "I'm feeling lucky" and the very first link in the very first page led me to the ending article, took me 5 seconds. Lucky indeed.

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.

Well, that was fun, but the inability to go back without completely restarting was a little frustrating.

This might be considered a feature since it makes it harder. I noticed you also can't Ctrl+F anywhere.

Particularly on mobile, where lots of small links next to each other is a minefield. I went to click the winning link one match only to click the line below, causing me to quit playing.

This is fun!!

"Advanced Audio Coding" to "Butterfly"

Time: 82.087 Seconds

Number of links visited: 7

The path you took: [ "Advanced Audio Coding", "Bell Labs", "C (programming language)", "Compiler", "Debugging", "Software bug", "Moth", "Butterfly" ]

My best run so far: --- "BugGuide" to "Macintosh"

Time: 30.698 Seconds

Number of links visited: 6

The path you took:

[ "BugGuide", "Website", "Web browser", "Safari (web browser)", "Mac OS X Panther", "MacOS", "Macintosh" ]

Got lucky with this pair:

"Professor" to "Education in France" Time: 66.789 Seconds

Number of links visited: 3

The path you took: [ "Professor", "Tertiary education", "Secondary education in France", "Education in France" ]

Best run so far:

--- "Performative verb" to "Mammal"

Time: 41.101 Seconds

Number of links visited: 4

The path you took: [ "Performative verb", "Verb", "Grammatical gender", "Human", "Mammal" ]

"Sri Lanka" to "Frankfurt" Time: 14.188 Seconds

Number of links visited: 2

The path you took: [ "Sri Lanka", "Financial centre", "Frankfurt" ]

oh boy! I remember playing this game several years ago.

Here's how my run went:

"800 (number)" to "Video game" Time: 155.120 Seconds

Number of links visited: 9

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.

----

"Grammatical tense" to "Scientific method" Time: 150.046 Seconds

Number of links visited: 9

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" ]

Not being able to search the page you're on kind of takes away from the fun.

"Impersonal verb" to "September 11 attacks"

Time: 101.131 Seconds

Number of links visited: 5

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" ]

Twitter to Gambia... That was way more fun than I thought it would be...

This game is awesome, I really get use my knowledge of the topics.

pfft - we used to do this in paper encyclopedias in middle school

There should be ranking charts for each combination.

An enjoyable waste of 45 minutes. A+

We used to play this in high school but it was always how many clicks to get to Nazi. We were a clever bunch.

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