Every philosopher on Wikipedia born before 1900, 1374 of them, and every link between their
articles. A community is a table where more of the guests link to each other than chance would give.
You are the host.
ONE TABLE · HOW TO PLAY
You get one guest, shown above, at the head of an empty table with 3, 5 or 9 seats. Press
Another guest if you want someone else.
Fill the seats. Type a name or pick from the list of people linked to the table. Each new
chair shows what that guest added to the score.
The score is links above chance: the links inside the table, minus what a shuffled network
with the same links would have put there. That second part grows with the guests’ total links, so
a hub costs more than a modest name with the same friends. This is a single table’s share of
modularity, times the number of links in the network.
Serve dinner when the table is full. A greedy host, a random host and the best table our
search ever found sit down for comparison, and you see how many of your guests Louvain puts at the same
table as your host.
The catch. The people your guest links to most are often hubs, and hubs are
expensive: every link they have raises what chance expects. The best tables are tight circles of modest
names who all know each other, and finding them is the whole game.
THE WHOLE ROOM · HOW TO PLAY
Pick how many place cards you get above. Each card seats one guest by hand.
Type a name, press Enter. The philosopher walks to a chair at a new table, and the colour
spreads: everybody not yet seated joins the table where most of the people they link to are sitting,
one ring of friends at a time, until the room settles. The chair shows how many guests they brought
along. To put two guests at the same table, click that table first.
Your score is Q, top right: modularity of the whole seating. Everyone at one table scores
exactly zero, so the game starts the moment you have two.
Serve dinner when you are done. Louvain, a greedy merger, a historian who seats by century and
a random host seat the same room, and you see where you and Louvain disagree, and whether Louvain even
agrees with itself.
The catch. A place card is not one seat, it is a lever. Seat Aristotle and three
hundred people move with him. Where the famous sit decides where the forgotten sit.