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