Six Degrees of Anything

two things · and the shortest loose excuse between them

to

The links are real in one narrow sense: everything in the lexicon carries a handful of loose tags — round, kept in a pocket, makes a noise — and the chain is the genuinely shortest path through that graph, found by breadth-first search rather than written in advance. The graph turned out to be dense — almost any two things in it are one or two hops apart — so there is a second button that deliberately takes the long way round instead, and the tally says which one you are looking at. What the links are not is an argument. A tag like “older than it looks” connects a whale to a cathedral bell and proves nothing at all, which is the entire point. Nothing is fetched and nothing you type is sent anywhere; the whole world this toy knows about is one file. ← back to the cabinet