It has been a while since I've written a day log. The last one I submitted was related to one of my favorite hobbies, growing plants (and failing to do so). This one will focus on another of my favorite hobbies: Everything 2. Specifically on a little E2 game I came up with to amuse myself (like there wasn't enough to amuse myself with around here already). The Softlink Game (and the current version, The Softlink Game 2.0) was inspired by the idea of Six Degrees of Separation, which is covered nicely in the node linked. The node Six Degrees of Everything approaches the idea of six degrees of separation, as it applies to E2, from a theoretical and mathematical perspective.
I wanted to test out the concept and the result was the game. It should be mentioned that another noder, Nemosyn, took an active interest in TSG and helped greatly with fine tuning and testing it out. It turns out that, with practice, one can almost always navigate between any two nodes, using only soft links (as long as the two nodes have soft links), with six clicks or less.
I hadn't played TSG2 in a while, so this morning I gave it a spin and will recount the steps in case anyone wants to read them.
The setup is routine. I started from the E2 home page, then clicked "Random Node" from the "Epicenter" nodelet. This will be the "start node". I then opened the E2 home page in a new, separate, tab and clicked "Random Node" again. This will be the "end (or destination) node". In my case, today, the start node was Speed Costs Money and the end node was broken hearts lie victims of the game. Game on!
My strategy is to look carefully at the soft links of both nodes for anything that seems likely to connect them. I also look for soft links that seem likely to lead to nodes with lots of soft links (opening up more options to try). In this case, both the "start" and the "end" node had a decent number of soft links (helpful).
From here it is hard to give specifics. In general, I try a path (two or three soft link clicks), opening each one in a new tab. Usually, the target I am looking for at this point is not the actual "end" node. It will normally be one of the soft links at the end node. By this time, I've identified one or more of these links as easier target nodes to "shoot for" (no pun intended). In this example, I selected the general categories of "guns" and "safety", maybe even "gun safety". Based on this intuitive choice, I made a few false starts. When each of these turned out to be wrong turns, I closed the tabs all the way back to the start node. This keeps things from getting cluttered and is a key reason for using new tabs for each "click". Finally, I tried How to win a knife fight from the soft links under the start node. This looked okay and led to Don't bring a knife to a gunfight. Right on track. Under that node, I selected Parents who won't let their children play with toy guns. I can now smell the destination node. Well, not really, but at least the scent of the "gun safety" topic I've chosen to aim for. For my 4th "click" I tried a few options. My "end" node showed up (as a soft link) under four rules of gun safety. So there you have it; random to random in five clicks. Try it, you may like it.