Michael Snow wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
What *would* be cool, and might just be a different implementation of exactly what you have in mind, would be a tool to find all the (reasonably short) click-paths between any two concepts. I mean, now that I selected the article titles randomly, I actually wonder how many clicks it takes to get from Marie Antionette to Michael Jordan. And what's intervening?
Over a year ago I raised the possibility of tracing every article back to the Main Page. None in my random sample was more than five links away. Thus if you trace Marie Antoinette and Michael Jordan back to the Main Page, the sum of their links will be a maximum distance. :-)
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but I don't think that last statement is correct. The number of links required to travel in one direction is not necessarily the same as the number required in the opposite direction. In this case, the paths from A to B and from A to C do not necessarily tell us anything about the path from B to C. Although if A is the Main Page, you can always cheat and use any of the navigation links that go there.
Theoretically the links in one direction should be the same if all the proper up and down links have been made. When I did my little experiment, I made use of the "What links here" function. Using A as the Main Page, if B is four clicks away from the Main Page, and C is five clicks away, then their maximum distance is 9. The fact that it's a maximum doesn't mean that it can't be less..
In my cruder moments I would say that the thing that these two had in common was baskets. He put his balls in a basket, while she put her head in one. :-\
Ec