The “Nationally Known Comedian” Richard Herring unleashed a thrilling new craze on the world during this week’s Collings and Herrin (sic) podcast… it goes like this1:
The aim of the game is to get between two specific Wikipedia entries using only the highlighted blue links. The player who navigates between the two pages within the fewest clicks, or uses the cleverest path is the winner. For example, to get from the Wikipedia page for American actress Argentina Brunetti to French anti-communist party La Cagoule, one could go via the following clicks:
(Argentina played a supporting role in the Lone Ranger in 1955, The Lone Ranger starred in a chocolate advertisment in the mid ninties advertising Rolos, Nestlé are a chocolate manufacturer, Nestlé are shareholders in L’Oréal, L’Oréal was founded by Eugène Schueller and Eugène Schueller provided financial support and held meetings for La Cagoule.)
Have fun.
1Description lifted from this RH forum to save me making up my own…
Is it cheating to add the links to wikipedia yourself?
Someone built a search tool to find the shortest paths a while back. See http://www.netsoc.tcd.ie/~mu/wiki/ .
For your example, you actually only need three clicks:
Argentina Brunetti
Italy
Italian fascism
La Cagoule
The reverse takes four:
La Cagoule
Italy
Sicily
List of Sicilian Americans
Argentina Brunetti
@James: yes, that was explicitly disallowed 🙂
@Anonymous: you’re no fun…
This may be thrilling, but it’s not terribly new– the craze for this has been coming round Wikipedia every so often for years. :/