Wikipedia Link Game: Creating SCC’s
Wikipedia Link Game
On the topic of information networks, it is understood that the WWW is basically just one big graph with an x number of nodes and edges. I like doing little experiments with the material learned in class and I wanted to focus on the graph structure of the WWW —Wikipedia as one, large portion of the web and see if I could find/prove an SCC based on the direction I take playing the Wikipedia Link Game.
The Wikipedia Link Game is pretty simple, yet it highlights the advancement, speed, and necessity of hyperlinks. A player picks two very random, unrelated topics and sees if/ how fast they can get from topic I to topic II only using links provided on the previous Wikipedia page. When the idea of information links and SCC was brought up, this game immediately came to mind because as Paul Gil explains in this article about the use of Hyperlinks, they “use a special kind of command that jumps to some other content in a web browser. (lifewire)” which is the exact task and performance of the game. The Link Game showcases the use of directed links, but there is a criterion of SCC that the game doesn’t touch on. A player must get from topic I to topic II, yet there’s no objective to be able to get from II back to I.
For the experiment, I had a friend pick two, unrelated topics and she came up with hamburgers and data science (crazy). I wanted to see if I could create a strongly connected graph with the various Wikipedia pages as nodes and the hyperlinks as one-way links. With some time, I was somehow able to create a web path from hamburgers to data science and different nodes from data science back to burgers, creating a one-way path that loops. Because there are no ‘broken’ links and the path returned to its original webpage (node), thus looping, the graph showcased the idea of Strongly Connected Components using something as simple as Wikipedia.
Although the concepts taught in Networks are very difficult, and aren’t necessarily ‘everyday topics,’ it’s excited to see how they can be seen in real life. Seeing how Information Networks function as we perform everyday tasks (such as surfing the web) shows just how important the concepts we are learning are to modern human life.
Webpage order I click on: Hamburgers— Fast food restaurants— Food engineering—Food science— Applied science— Science— Research— Data analysis— Data science
Data Science— Statistics— Mathematics— Nature— Protein— Metabolism— Type II Diabetes— Food and Drug Administration— Food safety—Food processing—Sausages— Ground beef—Hamburger
if graphed, the path virtually creates a circular path with one-way links that loops from a node n labeled data science.
https://www.lifewire.com/how-do-hyperlinks-work-2483287
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wiki_Game