The Distance between “Zero” and “Hero”: Exploring Synonym Chains with Mathematica
There is an old word game where you try to get from one word to another through connections with other words. For example, you might get from “cold” to “stationary” via the word “frozen”, since “cold” and “frozen” are synonyms and “frozen” and “stationary” are synonyms, albeit for different meanings of the word “frozen”.
I thought of this game when I started to learn the new graph theory functions in Mathematica 8. We can think of the words in the English language as the vertices of one large graph and the synonym connections between them as the graph edges. If you do that, it looks like this:
So let's see if we can generally solve this synonym chain problem.