Related link: http://thesaurus.plumbdesign.com/index.jsp
What can I say. It’s just stunningly cool. Run it. My favorite applet of all time, I think.
Right now, I’m trying to figure out: if every person is separated by at most 6 degrees from everyone else, and if every film start is separated by at most 6 “film degrees” from Kevin Bacon, is there a similar thing for words in a thesaurus?
For example: Can I reach any word in the dictionary in 12 or fewer steps from “egg” (I got from “egg” to “unimpaired” in only 5 steps. And from “egg” to “uncastrated” in only 6)?
What’s your candidate for the “Kevin Bacon” of the dictionary?
This is so very old
and still one of the best uses of the technology I have ever seen. I first saw it in 98 at the 7th annual WWW conference thingy, and I still use it for my class demonstrations.
Solving the degrees of separation problem
The question "is any word in the dictionary reachable from any other word in the dictionary" could be solved like this:
Build a graph data structure, where each vertex is a word, and an edge is a link between the words. Then using standard graph reachability algorithms you can get all kinds of information about the words in the graph.