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Comment by lbarrow

From a mathematical perspective, this is actually not that surprising.

Think of the act of clicking the first link in the Wikipedia article as a function that takes in the page you're on and outputs another page.

If you call this function on itself over and over again (ie use the output of one step as in the input of the next step), you will eventually enter a loop. The proof of this is simple: there are only a finite number of Wikipedia articles, therefore you must eventually reach an article you've seen before. (This is the same reason systems with a finite number of states cannot be chaotic.)

Since it's necessarily true that all articles will eventually reach a loop when you iteratively click the first link, we have to ask: how unusual is it that they usually reach the SAME loop?

parent lbarrow 14 years ago

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