THE answer to life, the universe and everything may be 42, but how many clicks does it take to ask the question?

Many readers probably already know about the "philosophy game" — in which you choose a random Wikipedia entry and, by following the first link on each page, see how long it takes to get to Philosophy.

Someone on Reddit discovered it. XKCD joked about it. Wikipedia even made a page for it.

But now, someone's actually run the numbers on it.

"Data nerd" Mat Kelcey downloaded a 30GB backup of every single Wikipedia entry and ran a script to get the lowdown on just how many connections there are and what they look like.

If you're comfortable with exponential notation, you can read all of the results here. If you're not, the key findings are that:

THREE and a half million pages eventually lead back to Philosophy.

ONE hundred thousand don't — of these, half end up in a never-ending loop, and half lead to dead ends.

"A snow fence is a structure, similar to a sand fence..."

THE most common number of clicks it takes to reach Philosophy is 23.

THE highest number of clicks it takes is 36 — from an entry for an upcoming Canadian film titled Violet & Daisy.

KELCEY'S favourite loop is between the entries for "Sand fence" and "Snow fence", both of which begin by saying how similar one is to the other.

Some of those facts have been unearthed before — a Wikipedia user already figured out that about 95 per cent of pages linked back — but most of them are new, and terrifically nerdy.

And, there's more to come.

Kelcey says "there's lots more to do" with the data, including running the analysis again on a more recent backup of Wikipedia to see what's changed and solving the mystery of why only a few pages take precisely 19 clicks to get back to Philosophy.