Oliver Goodwin-Day

There is a theory that for any 2 given Wikipedia pages, they are no more than 6 clicks away from each other. This concept has been popularised through Wikipedia Speedruns and Six Degrees of Wikipedia . I too was interested in this idea, so wrote a python program to parse, consolidate and store each wikipedia page's title and links from the Wikimedia-XML dumps in CassandraDB. I was then able to write a number of search algorithms including Branch and Bound and Iterative Deepening Depth-First Search from which I could enter 2 pages and find the shortest possible route. This project was very fun but also very time consuming (It was taking over 12 hours on my computer to parse and store the data!) but the results were really interesting.