The Wikipedia Game
Day 302 / 366
Years ago I and a few of my nerdy friends came up with a cool game to pass the time. The rules are simple. You come up with two terms that are not related at all. Start with the Wikipedia page for the first term. The objective is then to reach the Wikipedia page for the second term by clicking the links you see on the first page. But you have to do it in as few clicks as possible.
Now you might think that this is either too easy or too boring. But you would be wrong.
For instance, I was showing this game to a kid today, and as an example, I chose the two terms — Jabalpur and Pikachu. How do we get from Jabalpur to Pikachu on Wikipedia?
I went through this whole page, looking for anything that could move me closer to Pikachu. Only thing I could find was snooker, apparently, that game originated in Jabalpur.
So I clicked on Snooker and I was feeling much more confident now, since there are lots of international links now. I clicked on Olympic next, since it could lead me to Japan which could then lead me to Pikachu.
I didn’t find Japan, but I did find a link to Tokyo. Now I could go from Tokyo to Japan easily, but I thought I should look into the page more to see if I can find a better link. And I did find anime mentioned under the culture section. Bingo!
So within 4 clicks, I have reached from Jabalpur to Anime. Let’s find Pikachu now. The fifth click would be Pokemon.
And within the first few paragraphs of that page, we find Pikachu!
So we got from Jabalpur to Pikachu in 6 clicks.
Think you could do better? If you want to make it tougher, you can add a rule to not click the links for any Places (like Tokyo, Japan etc).