That's still using a portal... main > Tet Offensive > B-52 Stratofortress > Boeing > Airbus A380 How about a Brig (the ship, not a prison)?
Wiki > English Wiki > Arts > Fashion > Jewellery > Bling-bling > Chav Next up is Thich Quang Duc (you'll probably have to look him up before you start unless you're already aware of the connection...)
Wiki.org > Wiki eng > Earth > Silicon > Extended Peridoc table > Tc > 99Tc 6 Clicks =] Find me Bit-tech
Main page > Africa > Morocco > 1956 > Leo Laporte > This WEEK in TECH > Wil Harris > bit-tech Phew! Next up - Ming the Merciless
Main Page > America > George W. Bush > Laura Bush > Austin > Idiocracy 5 clicks Ok, next up is.. Rimming (lol)
dude.. wtf.. this is a family forum Main Page> Mass Communication> Magazines> List of Men's Magazines> Gay Times> Gay> Homosexuality> Oral sex> Analingus (redirects to Anal-oral sex page which rimming does too) btw.. your really ****ed up. next up is Silver Bullet (rapper)
silver bullet... Main Page>Metallurgy>Silver>Silver (disambiguation)>Silver bullet (rapper) Now find: Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell
I can hardly believe this thread is still going on! It's over two years old! Main Page > Economy of the Song Dynasty > Artillery > Soldier > United States Navy > Navy > Tom Clancy > Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell 7 clicks. Up next is Léon Foucault. As a side note, has anyone considered writing a program to find the shortest path? I'm not sure it's possible and I don't know which direction you'd start from, but it'd be an interesting exercise.
Main page > Christiaan Huygens > Light > Léon Foucault I'm hungry... How about some Okinawan cuisine? To continue the aside discussion, writing a program to find the shortest path wouldn't be too hard. You'd just need a ton of memory space and bandwidth. (edit) The way I would do it is a simple brute-force approach - build a tree starting with the main page, then with branches to every other page that the each page links to. Build the tree breadth-first, and the first time you come across the target word is the shortest path. Reasonable checks against redundancy and extra routes could be implemented as well, but I'm not sure if they're worth it as long as the path length stays low. (/edit)
An easier way would be to create a programme that built a tree looking at the "what links here" page from the original page and lead back to the main page via the subsequent "what links here"s. Kinda how I play the game atm.
Working backwards makes sense as well. You'd just need to keep a list of all articles linked from the front page to check against the "what links here" lists. Actually, it would take less memory if you were to work from both ends towards the middle, because of how trees scale - each new level of depth is an exponential increase in size, so having two smaller trees would take a lot less space than one monster. Each new link would have to be checked against all the nodes in the opposite tree, which would turn into a fairly long process (O(n2), rather than O(n)), but you would save a lot of memory. All depends on whether your CPU is faster than your hard drive, or vice versa.
shhh you'll give away all my secrets. ok so here's my chain. Main page > American Civil War > United States > Cuisine of the United States > Japanese cuisine > Japanese regional cuisine > Okinawan cuisine and i would like Smarties (Nestlé)
Main Page > Europe > Switzerland > Nestle > List Of Nestle Brands > Smarties find me : Superpower (ability)