Getting to Philosophy
Click the first ordinary link in a Wikipedia article, then the first link on that page, and keep going — a large majority of the time the chain converges on Philosophy.
There is a well-documented quirk of Wikipedia: start on almost any article, keep clicking the first non-parenthetical link in the body, and you funnel through increasingly abstract topics until you land on Philosophy — usually in a couple dozen hops or fewer.
Nobody designed this. It falls out of an editorial convention — articles tend to open by defining a thing in terms of a slightly more general thing — applied a few million times. It is emergence you can watch happen, a gradient that runs uphill toward abstraction.
Ported from a Python 2 script that scraped Wikipedia with BeautifulSoup and recursed on the first link. The recursion and loop-detection are reimplemented in TypeScript; scraping moved to a small server route to get around browser CORS.
Why the Martingale system always loses, run thousands of times over.