The Philosophy Game is a quantitative experiment to see how many steps any topic on Wikipedia is from the "Philosophy" page. This repository holds a simple Python script that does just that. It is a very simple script that does not deal with cases such as loops or invalid links. In practice we ran it in a bash script and a time out to rule out those corner cases.
To find out how many steps it takes to get to "Philosophy" run:
python exec.py "DESIRED TOPIC"exec.py-- A command-line wrapper that takes in the topic as an argument and runs the scraper script.algorithm.py-- Contains the algorithm, which relies on the HTML parser, to "walk" the pages until "Philosophy" is reached.html_parser.py-- All HTML parsing logic, such as finding the first link on each Wikipedia page is here.The Game of Philosophy.pdf-- Presentation given to the class at the end of the semester showcasing our results of running the script on a random sample of Wikipedia pages (scraped from their archive).