WikiRace Path Finder

Overview

This project is a WikiRace Path Finder that finds the shortest path between two Wikipedia pages using a bidirectional search strategy. It leverages JSoup to crawl Wikipedia and traverse links starting from both the source and target pages until a connection is found.

Play the game online:

WikiRace Game

How It Works

• Uses JSoup to scrape Wikipedia pages.
• Implements a breadth-first search (BFS) algorithm from both the start and end points.
• Detects disallowed pages using robots.txt.
• Constructs and returns the shortest path of Wikipedia links from the source to the target.

Technologies Used

• Java
• JSoup (for web scraping)
• BFS traversal algorithm

Code Structure

📂 WikiRacePathFinder
 ├── 📄 Main.java        # Entry point of the program
 ├── 📄 WikiCrawler.java # Crawler for finding paths between Wiki pages
 ├── 📄 PageNode.java    # Node representation of a Wikipedia page
 ├── 📄 README.md        # Project documentation

Usage

Setup

Ensure you have Java 8+ installed.

Run the Program

javac Main.java
java Main

Example Output

Tennis -> Sports -> Video game -> Fortnite

This means the program found a path from the Tennis Wikipedia page to Fortnite via Sports and Video game.

Future Enhancements

• Optimize search with parallel processing.
• Implement a web UI for visualization.
• Add heuristic-based search algorithms for faster results.

Contributors

• Connor Tynan
• Gavin Fisher