npoet / wikipedia-game Goto Github PK

• requests

. wiki-game
├── _utils              (utility functions)
|   ├── links.py        (functions to find page names, links, and backlinks)
|   └── search.py       (implementation of simple search and BFS)
├── README.md
├── requirements.txt
└── wikipedia_game.py   (functional script)

This package can be run as a single script via wikipedia_game.py (after installing requirements):

python3 wikipedia_game.py "{start_page}" "{end_page}"

The script directly accesses the Wikipedia API using the popular requests package for Python 3. First it checks for direct links between pages, followed by pages with a single intermediate link using links and backlinks. If there are two or more page hops, it finds the full path with an implementation of BFS (breadth-first search).

It could be productive to implement a bidirectional search using both interwiki links and backlinks to enhance search speed compared to traditional BFS (search time is currently quite slow for distantly related pages). Could also use any number of public word association API's to check strongest possible links first, also likely saving compute time. Additionally, try/except error handling for requests sessions may be useful.