[HN Gopher] Anime fans stumbled upon a mathematical proof
___________________________________________________________________
Anime fans stumbled upon a mathematical proof
Author : classichasclass
Score : 481 points
Date : 2025-03-06 16:37 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.scientificamerican.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.scientificamerican.com)
| layer8 wrote:
| Previous discussions:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18292061
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23968618
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39325146
|
| See also:
|
| https://mathsci.fandom.com/wiki/The_Haruhi_Problem
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superpermutation#Lower_bounds,...
| Izkata wrote:
| The image in the upper-right of the Fandom link was how it was
| posted in the 4chan thread, little disappointing it's left out
| of most posts about it.
|
| The character is actually from _Steins;Gate_ , not _The
| Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya_ : https://steins-
| gate.fandom.com/wiki/Kurisu_Makise
| Hamuko wrote:
| Kurisu in front of a whiteboard with "You should be able to
| solve this" is a fairly famous post format.
|
| https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=%22You%20should%20be%2.
| ..
| dang wrote:
| Wow I had no idea. Thanks! Macroexpanded:
|
| _Unscrambling the hidden secrets of superpermutations_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39325146 - Feb 2024 (8
| comments)
|
| _Mystery math whiz and novelist advance permutation problem_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36191831 - June 2023 (92
| comments)
|
| _An Anonymous 4chan Post Helped Solve a 25-Year-Old Math
| Puzzle (2018)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23968618
| - July 2020 (7 comments)
|
| _Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved an
| interesting problem_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18292061 - Oct 2018 (198
| comments)
|
| If anyone can find other threads in this set, let me know and
| I'll add them here.
| nash wrote:
| I hope there is a specific order we should look at these
| threads.
| shric wrote:
| You can read them in any order
| jeanlucas wrote:
| Oh no
| app13 wrote:
| Fear not, there is a handy proof we can use here...
| yccs27 wrote:
| Let's try them all and see which order is the best.
| nazgulsenpai wrote:
| It could have been a mathematician , you never know with that
| Anon guy.
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| If they were mathematicians, they would have published it, no?
| groby_b wrote:
| Maybe. Writing a publication is a lot more work than a post
| on 4chan, even if it's a good post.
|
| If it's not your field you might well not bother to write the
| paper. (After all, it's not your field, somebody might have
| solved it since it didn't seem _that_ hard, and do you really
| want to do an exhaustive literature research for a fun puzzle
| you worked out?)
| Barrin92 wrote:
| A chess club I played at was frequented by a guy who used to
| work as mathematician but got fed up by it at some point and
| started to work as a chess trainer. Still did maths and
| blogged regularly but never bothered to publish academic
| work.
|
| There's a lot of people like that in maths. Very talented but
| dropping in and out of it or doing it recreationally.
| rincebrain wrote:
| I think Grigori Perelman, who solved the Poincare
| conjecture and declined the Fields medal and Millennium
| prize money for it, then said he has retired from
| professional mathematics to avoid the fame, might qualify
| as the most famous in recent memory.
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| Interestingly, his seminal papers on (alongside other
| major contributions) solving the Poincare conjecture
| weren't published in a journal but were simply uploaded
| on arXiv. Moreover, similar to GP's mathematician may
| say, Grigori quit professional mathematics not just to
| avoid fame but also due to disappointment over the field
| ethics.
| notpushkin wrote:
| Even without considering the reasons already mentioned...
| isn't it more _fun_ to be cited as an Anonymous 4chan poster?
| VVilhelmsen wrote:
| Well it was posted on the science and math board so there's a
| good chance. Headline is a bit clickbaity
| tocs3 wrote:
| I have, for a long time, dismissed Scientific American as a
| pointless work of marketing. This article, on the other hand,
| makes me think I may be missing some things. The problem is
| stated in an interesting way that might be broadly understood and
| enjoyed. It gives some results that are explained well and easily
| understood. It also leaves some open questions that can be
| explored, letting the explorer dream about settling some famous
| open problem. The perfect sort of thing for high school math (and
| an old guy killing some time).
|
| Thank you Manon Bischoff (author), Daisy Yuhas (editor), and
| Scientific American for giving me this to think about.
| tombert wrote:
| I've never really done it at any advanced level, but I think
| good "science communication for the masses" is just a _really_
| hard problem. I say that because it seems like there 's an
| overwhelming amount of really bad science communication out
| there.
|
| You have creators like Veratasium on YouTube, who I think do
| really great jobs making a lot of science and mathematical
| topics interesting to nearly everyone, but there's also a lot
| of articles that are either very boring, incorrect,
| overpromising, or some combination of the three.
| dylan604 wrote:
| My main issue is when the author assumes the reader knows
| much more about a topic and just glosses over salient details
| on that assumption. It's not necessarily intentional by the
| author, and is more of an editorial problem. When you're
| speaking with someone or a group, you can see the looks on
| people's faces if you're losing them, or they interrupt
| asking for more details. In a written piece, that is not
| possible and a target base level needs to be set with details
| for that level to follow along. It's up to the editor to go
| back to the author for that information if things are being
| glossed over.
| ziddoap wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/2501/
| tombert wrote:
| It's a fine art; if you were to go into detail about every
| single thing mentioned by your article, your article would
| be hundreds of pages long and probably a pretty boring and
| dry read, but if you don't go into enough detail you risk
| it being difficult for most of the population.
|
| I agree it's up to the editor to figure out where to draw
| that line, and a lot of them aren't terribly good at that.
| JTbane wrote:
| > I think good "science communication for the masses" is just
| a really hard problem.
|
| Not only is it hard, but there are tons of examples of hoaxes
| that spread like wildfire. The latest I can remember were the
| room-temperature superconductor papers.
| tombert wrote:
| Yeah, I'm still disappointed by that one. I was super
| excited by the LK99 stuff; I don't know if that was a
| "hoax", but it was definitely bad science that took the
| media by storm.
|
| I think that the problem is that there's effectively an
| infinite amount of science and it changes and updates all
| the time, so it's impossible to be truly "caught up" with
| everything, and most studies are already in pretty specific
| niche subjects that require a lot of understanding on that
| niche subject. Most people doing science communication
| can't possibly learn it all, and most certainly aren't
| equipped to call out fraud of bad science in a paper, so
| they have to take the papers at their word.
|
| I mean, before I dropped my PhD, I was studying formal
| methods in computer science. I got reasonably good with
| state machine models in Isabelle, so you'd think I'd be
| competent with "formal methods" as a concept, but not
| really. If I were try and read a paper on, I don't know,
| "Cubic Type Theory with Agda", I would have to do a _lot_
| of catching up, almost starting from scratch, and I think I
| 'm probably better equipped than the average software
| engineer for that. Even if I got to a state of more-or-less
| understanding it, I would certainly not be equipped to call
| out bad science or math or fraud or anything like that.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| I used to be a subscriber for years a long time ago. I'm not
| sure where you got this opinion unless you are basing things on
| recent years. There was always something interesting in them.
| kelipso wrote:
| It's kind of the default opinion in academia. Same goes for
| most popsci stuff I guess.
| tocs3 wrote:
| I used to enjoy the magazine and am basing my negative
| opinion (expressed above) on reading experience on more
| recent readings. I used to enjoy the amateur scientist and
| mathematical recreation the most. Then those sections
| disappeared. I have not been reading it recently so maybe
| things have changed some.
| wrs wrote:
| You are not wrong. Check the archives before the 2000s and
| it's a very different magazine. A while back, the editorial
| direction changed. It used to be aimed at scientists who
| might be in a different field from the article, or
| amateurs/nonscientists who were at that level. Then it
| became more for nonscientists who are somewhat interested
| in the topic. The new editors seemed to wish it was
| Discover magazine, and now it basically is.
|
| Bear in mind this is a magazine that published complete
| plans for building an argon laser in your garage. Including
| the glassblowing.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| I only had a subscription during the early 2000s. I think
| it was still a good magazine. There were still some
| interesting articles and things to learn.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| Yes, I fully agree. It's 2025 now, so it's actually been
| bad for a while.
|
| I do sometimes wonder if I should get a current
| subscription to get access to the archive though.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| Sometimes magazines change management/ownership/other. On the
| outside they look similar but they lose that 'something' that
| made them interesting to read. For example For me this
| happened with both Dr. Dobbs and MSJ (renamed to MSDN). Both
| had large management changes and became very quickly
| something else. Not nearly as engaging or interesting. I
| realized I had not looked at either in a year. Skimmed them
| for anything I wanted to read and found nothing. I dropped
| the sub.
| fastball wrote:
| Eh, this is kinda blogspam. It's been well-covered by others in
| the past.
| tombert wrote:
| There's something unbelievably funny to me that actual
| mathematical papers have to cite a 4chan post.
|
| It does make me wonder how much hidden knowledge is hidden in
| parts of the internet; maybe this is the only genius mathematical
| thing we've _found_ on 4chan...
| bloomingkales wrote:
| If you were to ask an LLM trained on just scientific data to
| solve this problem, it would either solve it really quickly
| because it has seemingly irrelevant 4chan data or it would not
| solve it at all. It's _a_ argument against non-general LLMs,
| and very low-key shout out to liberal arts degrees.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > It does make me wonder how much hidden knowledge is hidden in
| parts of the internet
|
| That was the shining hope of the internet. "Information wants
| to be free" and now it could be available to anyone with a
| modem vs just in university or municipal libraries. Now, we
| have megasites that dominate the web's attention with very
| trivial and banal content that makes looking for that
| information nearly impossible.
| acureau wrote:
| Well, it's not as if that promise didn't come true. We do
| have the world's knowledge at our fingertips. It's more of a
| curation problem, and a natural result of a decentralized
| web. Wikipedia could be considered a "megasite", but I'd
| argue it's more valuable than a million independent sites.
| tombert wrote:
| Yeah that's kind of what I was getting at.
|
| Who knows what kind of weird mathematical or scientific
| things have been discovered by hobbyists and posted on some
| obscure forum thread or abandoned blog that wasn't
| appreciated by anyone?
|
| Like, if someone had a proof for the Goldbach Conjecture,
| and for whatever reason posted about it on the WatchUSeek
| forums (just as a throwaway example), it could just lay
| dormant for who knows how long? The audience on WatchUSeek
| might not realize the significance of a such a discovery,
| and maybe not even the poster, so it doesn't get any
| recognition and just never gets picked up.
|
| I mean, going with the example in the original post, I
| don't know much about Superpermutations (only a little
| _after_ this post went viral), so if I had seen this 4chan
| post in the wild, I would just assume it 's some guy doing
| a bit of math that I wasn't familiar with. I wouldn't be
| able to spot that this was actually a _contribution_ to
| anything.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Is it better if there are lots of hidden gems tucked away
| on obscure websites? Actually I think that is a sort of
| interesting question. The world is a more interesting
| place if there are hidden bits I guess. And there will be
| some hidden pieces of info, so maybe it is good if
| there's enough out there to incentivize exploration.
|
| On the other hand, it is nice and convenient if
| everything is indexed.
|
| I dunno. Conflicted.
| dylan604 wrote:
| It's kind of like that one scroll tucked away in some
| catacomb which nobody has looked at for hundreds of years
| that has the one bit of information that answers so many
| questions. The information is technically there, but you
| first need to know where to look. Discovery is always a
| problem.
| wombatpm wrote:
| Just to clarify: all perpetual motion machine videos on
| TikTok are fake or using the stored energy of magnets
| over time.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Pretty sure if anyone found true perpetual motion that
| I'd be hearing about it all month on HN. It'd be a
| discovery on the level of Newton's laws.
| dylan604 wrote:
| This is how I feel about AI/LLM discussions, except it's
| all a perpetual motion machine demo that people _are_
| falling for it. Kind of like crypto
| crummy wrote:
| But Copilot exists and people seem to be happy to pay for
| it.
| DrillShopper wrote:
| (Some) people are also happy to pay to have someone piss
| on them, too. Do you think Microsoft should offer a
| Golden Shower tier of Copilot, complete with Trickle
| Down?
| notpushkin wrote:
| I'm sure that's negotiable in their Enterprise offerings.
| tombert wrote:
| They already have this service, it's called "CosmosDB".
| tombert wrote:
| Oh, to be clear, there's a _lot_ of bullshit on the
| internet, that might be the majority of stuff on the
| internet. Perpetual motion stuff is an example of
| bullshit.
|
| Still, I do wonder what cool (and real) stuff on the
| internet that people don't really know about is actually
| significant.
| moi2388 wrote:
| Which is strange, because it's rather trivial. You make
| your machine inside out. Now the entire universe is on
| the inside of it, so all energy it gets from external
| sources is technically on the inside.
| arkh wrote:
| The worst are the information blackholes created by apps like
| Discord or Slack.
|
| Lot of technical communities are there nowadays, lot of ideas
| are just out of view from anything public.
| h2zizzle wrote:
| One must hope that the spirit that compells malicious
| actors to archive private p*rn Discord servers on a
| publicly-accessible site eventually finds itself to people
| with access to technical servers. I get that everyone wants
| their secret hangout, but not everything needs to be a SCIF
| wannabe. Publish those logs.
| ziddoap wrote:
| Not only cite, but listed as the first author!
|
| https://oeis.org/A180632/a180632.pdf
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| TO BE OR NOT TO BE THAT IS THE GGGZORNONPLATT
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Zalgo, your parole is still in effect.
| ydnaclementine wrote:
| you mean unbelievably based
| bawolff wrote:
| I always found it interesting how serious computer security
| papers commonly cite random stuff on the internet.
|
| Phrack probably has hundreds or maybe thousands of citations to
| it at this point.
| Oarch wrote:
| I recommend watching the Internet Historian's video series on
| He Will Not Divide Us for similarly ingenious buffoonery.
| kikokikokiko wrote:
| The He Will Not Divide Us saga teached me, really early, to
| never leave any personal information on the web, and above
| all, to never piss off groups of male teenagers/early adults
| with a lot of free time on their hands and a penchant for
| doing anything for the lolz.
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| "male teenagers/early adults", pretty big assumption there.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| Not many, probably. As in, why would this happen.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| Because why would you think this is of any relevance? You're
| making some estimate and go like "welp I guess that's good
| enough" and assume that there must be a proper mathematical
| approach to this.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| Yes but if you have the skills to do something like that,
| then you're probably aware that this is a new solution to a
| problem.
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| What other accidental discoveries are buried in meme threads
| and forgotten forums?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| What comes to mind is TempleOS, I'm confident there's a lot of
| really interesting code decisions and algorithms in there.
|
| Of course the other factor is your own comprehension powers; I
| can't comprehend math or complex algorithms, so I don't
| actually know if there are any that I could apply to my usual
| software development problems.
|
| (I doubt it, it's high level front end stuff, all the complex
| bits are lower down)
| tombert wrote:
| I asked a question years ago about trying to make a "real"
| operating system out of TempleOS [1], because I agree there's
| probably some more to it than just a meme.
|
| I don't know enough about operating systems to really know if
| there's anything clever in there, but that gets to your
| point; part of the issue comes down to the ability to
| understand what you're reading, as you pointed out.
|
| If I had seen the original 4chan post back when it was new, I
| wouldn't have thought much of it, because I don't know
| anything about superpermutations or combinatorics. If I had
| seen the post, I would have thought "oh there's some math I
| never learned, cool" and moved on, not realizing its
| significance.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14075795
| Modified3019 wrote:
| Non-paywall link: https://archive.is/i140b
| _trampeltier wrote:
| Should not the de Bruijn sequence work somehow for this problem?
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Bruijn_sequence
| ball_of_lint wrote:
| That would give you some string that contains all the
| permutations, but definitely not the shortest such string.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| Loath as I am to give 4chan credit for anything positive, I feel
| like the article subject is slightly dismissive with its use of
| the phrase "stumbled upon." The anonymous 4chan user clearly _did
| the work_ , it's not as though they came upon a proof written in
| the sand. For all we know it was a grad student with an ABD in
| Statistics who just happened to like anime.
|
| But the phrasing almost implies it's not a true accomplishment
| because "scientists" didn't discover it.
| asddubs wrote:
| i took it to mean that they stumbled upon it in the sense that
| they didn't try to make a novel contribution to the field of
| mathematics or think they were doing that, but just solving a
| specific problem
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| I suppose in my head, when the phrase "stumbled upon" is
| used, it would imply that someone was solving a problem that
| they weren't intending to solve, or via a method that they
| weren't intending. A hypothetical headline might be "Food
| scientist stumbles upon cure for cancer while refining
| process for fish oil": the scientist wasn't _trying_ to solve
| the problem of cancer, they were trying to solve the problem
| of extending fish oil shelf-life, and incidentally found the
| former.
|
| But you would find it strange if the article said,
| "Oncologist stumbles upon cure for cancer while testing new
| colon cancer treatment." Because in that case, the scientist
| is seemingly doing what he set out to do--it was not
| unintentional.
|
| It seems like the 4chan poster knew enough about mathematics
| to recognize the stated problem as a mathematical problem and
| write a proof for it. That already demonstrates a degree of
| specialty and intention that makes "stumble upon" seem
| dismissive, to me. The fact that they didn't know they were
| solving a a more general, already-known problem is
| irrelevant, IMO. It would almost be like denying them credit
| because they didn't fill out the paperwork correctly.
| Arnavion wrote:
| "Stumbled upon" is used for mathematicians discovering
| something by working it out all the time.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > But you would find it strange if the article said,
| "Oncologist stumbles upon cure for cancer while testing new
| colon cancer treatment." Because in that case, the
| scientist is seemingly doing what he set out to do--it was
| not unintentional.
|
| I wouldn't really find that strange. Finding a cure for
| cancer is not an expected outcome of testing a cancer
| treatment and certainly isn't what the oncologist is trying
| to do. It's directly related to what you _were_ trying to
| do, and better, but it 's still a lucky find that you
| weren't looking for.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I don't know how related colon cancer is to general
| cancer treatment, but sure. If they end up making a
| general formula while researching a specific one, many
| people in the field would say they "stumled upon" gold.
| Even if they were looking for silver to begin with.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I don't know how related colon cancer is to general
| cancer treatment
|
| Doesn't matter; that's not relevant to my point. When we
| attempt to find cancer treatments, we don't expect to
| find cures. (That's why we say "treatments"!) The goal of
| research into colon cancer is not to find a cure for
| colon cancer. It's to get the amount of remission that
| patients can expect to enjoy higher. Eliminating the
| cancer entirely is a completely different kind of result,
| and it would be the goal of a different kind of research.
| hilsdev wrote:
| 4chan has a large cesspit, but it gathers a lot of intelligent
| people who can ignore the noise. For any interest, there's
| someone somewhere who made a half decent thread on the topic.
| There's decent barriers too (as in the less talked about boards
| are more thoroughly moderated than the ones that make the news,
| much like Reddit)
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Shhh!!! Don't tell them that 4chan is the best origami/paper
| craft website on the internet!
| jjmarr wrote:
| one letter off from the alt-right!
| TyPepakura3 wrote:
| They taught me how to model and how to transfer models to
| pepakura. It's really amazing how everything was just in
| place and you could ask a person something and have the
| answer by the next day.
|
| Reddit has shades of this, but it was never truly focused.
| The upvote system kills small discussions.
| rat9988 wrote:
| Most popular websites gather a lot of intelligent people.
| Nothing specific to 4chan.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| 4chan was very early, if not close to first of what we'd
| describe as a "forum" and persisted through the decades.
| That's the notable factor, outside of all the "noise"
| described above.
|
| But yes, the noise was also a part of the surprise factor
| here. Many people have this perception that intelligent
| people are dignified, studious,and fancy in their demeanor.
| So someone like that hanging out on an "anime forum" can be
| shocking to some.
| bawolff wrote:
| > 4chan was very early, if not close to first of what
| we'd describe as a "forum" and persisted through the
| decades
|
| That feels untrue. 4chan was launched only in 2003.
| Forums are much older than that.
|
| Especially if you count forum-like things that aren't
| called forums, like usenet or bbs.
| pimlottc wrote:
| CompuServe used the term "forums" going back at least to
| the late 1980s
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| It's a natural term to use for it. Since about the time
| of the Romans.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > That feels untrue. 4chan was launched only in 2003.
| Forums are much older than that.
|
| Web forums are basically as old as the web; I have
| accounts that are older than 4chan on forums (what I
| believe is the oldest forum that I have an account on,
| which also has my oldest continuous forum account [though
| not my _first_ forum account] launched in 1996 -- I didn
| 't join until 2002.)
|
| Online forums, more generally, are _older_ than the web,
| whether you are talking about email listservers, nntp
| groups, or CompuServe forums.
| ryoshu wrote:
| Usenet was great until the spammers arrived.
| tstrimple wrote:
| I've still found a lot of use for it from a "free
| content" platform and haven't seen anything at all from
| the spammers. Maybe it's a matter of the indexers I use?
| What form does usenet spam take?
| ecshafer wrote:
| > Loath as I am to give 4chan credit for anything positive
|
| Why, whats wrong with 4chan? Outside of /pol/ and /b/ its just
| an image board with many different users.
| lukas099 wrote:
| Kinda with you, but outside of those two there is still a
| bias towards antisemitism and misogyny among other uncouth
| worldviews.
| russelg wrote:
| And those people are rightly called out as tourists, and
| told to go back to the hole they came from.
| tstrimple wrote:
| Yes, once I was naive enough to believe that all the
| 4chan regulars were just being ironic and it was just the
| uninformed visitors who took the degeneracy seriously.
| Unfortunately we all have to grow up at some point.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Ahem, you were bullshitting something?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boogaloo_movement
|
| ...also, a _huge_ number of mass shooters have been 4chan
| regulars...
| TyPepakura3 wrote:
| And /v/. Basically, if it would attract a child, it does, and
| you stay away.
|
| The issue is it's not a fun website. The creative spark is
| gone.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Not even close. A long time ago I spent a decent amount of
| time on 4chan and left because of the incessant bigotry,
| which was pervasive.
| onetimeusename wrote:
| This story resurfaces every few years but the original post was
| on the /sci/ board in 2011. That was a loooooong time ago and
| although no one back then would have said 4chan was good (it
| was never good), it also doesn't surprise me it was originally
| posted there at that time. I don't think it would happen now.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| 4chan was great, but it very much was one of the oldest
| proprietors of the so called "normie filter". The biggest
| most offensive boards caused 95% of the trouble the site is
| known for.
|
| the smaller boards and threads could get some interesting
| stories and content (of all were of course, of reasonable
| falseness and potential homosexuality). The vibe was fine as
| long as you avoided the modern attitude and approach
| everything with hostility. Unlike say, modern twitter,
| everyone in 4chan was in agreement that they were full of
| shit. It was never trying to be this platform of serious
| debate. Understanding that ironically enough frees you of a
| lot of inhibitions.
|
| ----
|
| All the "elites" were definitely gone by the middle of the
| 2010's, though. Probably to less controversial and more
| popular platforms. It's nearly impossible to replicate this
| nowadays.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| 4chan became the normie
| somenameforme wrote:
| There's something great about enforced anonymity. It gets
| rid of people saying what they _think_ they should say, and
| instead simply what they think.
|
| It reminds one of the wisdom of the masses experiments. If
| you take a bunch of people and ask them how many peas are
| in a jar, the average will come out _extremely_ close to
| the right answer. But if you let those people collaborate,
| debate, and try to pick the smartest answer - it tends to
| be far less accurate.
|
| It's part of the reason that I think decentralize
| everything is the way to go. You'll never reach the utopic
| highs that a perfect centralization might offer, but you'll
| also never reach the dystopic lows that a flawed
| centralization can impose.
| tstrimple wrote:
| > There's something great about enforced anonymity. It
| gets rid of people saying what they think they should
| say, and instead simply what they think.
|
| No it absolutely does not. It enables people to hold
| whatever positions are immediately expedient regardless
| of personal beliefs. There is no way to call an anonymous
| person a hypocrite when you cannot connect their directly
| contradictory statements due to their anonymity. 4chan is
| a perfect example of group think overriding other
| opinions.
| somenameforme wrote:
| And does calling a person a hypocrite make them go 'Oh
| gosh, you're right. Let me immediately change my
| opinion.'? No, even the most justified ad hominem does
| nothing more than encouraging self censorship, which is
| completely contrary to what's desired when the goal is to
| understand what people truly think and believe.
|
| Humans are not consistent. We hold conflicting views, and
| in a decade we'll think a good chunk of what we believe
| today is idiotic. It's all fine and normal.
|
| I would also add that in many cases claims of hypocrisy
| are themselves somewhat disingenuous, because scarce (and
| perhaps even undesirable) is the human that holds any
| given view as absolute dogma. We all hold views and
| values on a spectrum. For instance utilitarianism and
| taking the 'intuitive' solution to the trolley problem
| are not mutually exclusive, because one's adoption of
| utilitarianism is often of the nature of simply generally
| preferring utilitarian solutions, rather treating it as
| the be all, end all, of decision making.
| t-3 wrote:
| So what? Hypocrisy is part of the human condition. We can
| only rid ourselves of it by actually expressing and
| exploring our true beliefs and reflecting on them in the
| context of our actions. Carefully curating a public image
| to match what the blob expects doesn't assist in that at
| all.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| The smaller boards still had plenty of racism, homophobia,
| misogyny, etc. It's just that people went full Bigot on
| /b/.
| finnthehuman wrote:
| >Loath as I am to give 4chan credit for anything positive
|
| I love the fact we have somewhere unambiguously lowbrow on the
| internet. It's fun to watch how highbrow places talk about it.
| mjr00 wrote:
| As the saying goes, most social media is stupid people
| pretending to be smart; 4chan is smart people pretending to
| be stupid.
| lukas099 wrote:
| I wouldn't say 4chan's smarter than other social media. I'd
| say "stupid people not pretending".
| fastball wrote:
| The median user definitely seems smarter on 4chan (at
| least that is how it felt 10-20 years ago).
| tstrimple wrote:
| I think median is the wrong term here. There are some
| absolute freak geniuses on 4chan, but it's not the norm.
| It's the exception. The median is just as fucking stupid
| as they present themselves to be.
| make3 wrote:
| does it still exist? this is an old story
| WJW wrote:
| You can literally type in the url mate. Just go and check
| for yourself instead of having to ask HN.
| make3 wrote:
| I mean, do people still use it in large amounts, is it
| popular, don't be so literal
| dokyun wrote:
| implying hacker news is highbrow
| seanw444 wrote:
| I tend to enjoy the banter on 4chan more than here.
| Everyone is expected to dish it and take it there. Peoples'
| biases are obvious, because they make it clear who they
| dislike fairly often. Nobody actually takes any real
| offense to it all. It's quite pleasant compared to the
| sanitized world of... literally anywhere else.
|
| Of course, if seeing the N word makes you obsessively
| clutch pearls, then it's not the place for you. If you can
| let stuff roll right off you, it's fun, and there can be
| dialogue of interest here and there. /g/ being most similar
| to here, of course.
| dokyun wrote:
| An issue I have with imageboards is that use of images
| invites low-effort posting because it makes it easy to be
| as annoying as possible, whereas with pure text making
| inflammatory remarks at least takes some forethought, and
| it invites unique forms of creative writing. Anonymous
| textboards I think have the best forms of banter, but
| they're dying out these days. Over here people have
| incentives to appease others by gathering upvotes, so
| they feign this type of altruism that keeps them from
| being too inflammatory and makes them resort to stupid
| shit like tone indicators instead of being clever enough
| to write it that way.
| hatsunearu wrote:
| My experience is that 4chan is obscure and annoying
| enough to browse and participate that it keeps the lowest
| of low effort posts down. Like if you look at websites
| that are easy to participate, like Facebook or reddit,
| you're just gonna see the worst of the worst.
| seanw444 wrote:
| The low-effort posting (AKA shitposting) is part of what
| makes it great. It's kind of an acquired taste, but
| there's a certain humor to it.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| "If you can ignore the rampant homophobia, misogyny,
| racism, organized harassment campaigns, doxxing, and high
| level state official kidnapping conspiracies, it's a
| great place to hang out!"
|
| ...or I can just participate in communities which are
| still plenty irreverent but doesn't have any of that?
|
| Goddamn people - stop romanticizing 4chan or acting like
| it somehow gives us something special or unique.
| seanw444 wrote:
| You just described why it's unique, and then claimed it's
| not unique. It's clearly not your cup of tea.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| You mean the place that has generated numerous mass shooters
| and the "boogaloo movement" which among other things tried to
| kidnap a governor?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boogaloo_movement
| votiv wrote:
| @gwern was it you?
| rootsudo wrote:
| Woah, Haruhi is now considered classic.
| trothamel wrote:
| The anime will be 19 years old next month, so it's probably not
| wrong to consider it such.
| ziddoap wrote:
| It reinforces that I'm getting old, though.
| t-3 wrote:
| Calling Haruhi classic isn't that bad - I've seen people on
| this site referring to 2010s-era hardware as "retro".
| cyborgx7 wrote:
| When the AVGN started out, the SNES was roughly as old as the
| PS3 is now.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| Didn't need to read that! I've often thought I will truly
| feel my age when they start calling the Xbox 360 'retro'.
| Not far off if we're not already there.
| GolDDranks wrote:
| It was a huge hit, and those tend to turn into classics with
| age. Gotta admit that it's making me feel old.
| bntyhntr wrote:
| At one of my old jobs, the bathroom was locked with a 4 digit
| code followed by the key symbol. We jokingly made up "Bathroom
| Code" as an interview question/to nerd snipe each other instead
| of working, which was "assuming you don't have to press key, and
| that the bathroom door will unlock if the correct 4 digits are
| entered in order at any time, write the code to print the
| shortest possible test sequence to guarantee you entry".
| Obviously we didn't give this to any candidates but it's amusing
| to think that the problem is a lot more interesting than we gave
| it credit for.
| OscarCunningham wrote:
| If the code is allowed repeats then the problem is much easier:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Bruijn_sequence.
| Out_of_Characte wrote:
| Superpermutation must repeat all possible combination in the
| shortest number possible. De Bruijn sequence places a lower
| bound on the length of superpermutations but shorter
| sequences are possible. De bruijn is also cyclical, which
| superpermutations in the literature are not.
| slazaro wrote:
| Given that you just care about 4 digit codes (so you don't
| actually care about a generic algorithm that's not super slow
| in asymptotic time), can't you just solve it with an easy to
| code bruteforce algorithm? Or is the combinatorial explosion so
| big that it's actually intractable that way?
| dumbfounder wrote:
| Think about this. You need to calculate the number of
| permutation for 4 digit codes. Then you need to arrange them
| in every order possible to brute force. So that's 4!!. That's
| a lot: roughly 620000000000000000000000 combos.
| genewitch wrote:
| Or it's 10000?
| SamBam wrote:
| That's the number of possible codes. Not the number of
| possible ways you could arrange all 10000 codes to see
| which ordering contains the most shortcuts.
| genewitch wrote:
| i have a python script running through that right now to
| find "the shortest" and it's been burning a single core
| for at least 6 hours. So it looks like you are right and
| i am wrong ;-)
|
| i assume my pc on a single core can do ~1billion
| permutations per second, this will take 19,647 millennia.
| AFK.
|
| what do you think the chances are, if i let this run,
| that it would find a shorter solution than 625
| keypresses? the naive De Bruijn algorithm popped that out
| in like 2 seconds.
| somenameforme wrote:
| If you're not making some joke that I'm missing it's just
| 10^4 = 10000, which is a just a fancier way of saying
| 0000-9999.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| 10^4 permutations. Which you then permute _again_ except
| the second time you 're overlapping them to search for
| the shortest possible sequence.
| genewitch wrote:
| You know Ford/Lincoln had those buttons / touch strip in the
| door with the buttons labelled like [1|2] [3|4], and so on to
| [9|0]?
|
| There's a permutation list claimed to be the shortest that I
| used to carry in my PDA to impress friends that had one of
| those sorts of cars. If I recall, it was guaranteed to open the
| door in something like 32 button presses, but it may have been
| less.
|
| It was because there was no "start" or stop to the sequence,
| the computer would unlock if the sequence appeared intact
| anywhere. So a code 3,4,5,6 would trigger with
| 8,2,7,3,4,5,6,0,2
| ChoGGi wrote:
| And in other fun knowledge, the f150 2016 has no way to
| disable that keypad. Short of taking apart the door and
| disconnecting it.
| lupire wrote:
| 3+5 _4_ 3 _2=123, so 4 digit code would require at least 134
| key presses.
|
| Even 3 digit code would require over 60 keypresses.
|
| We're there other constraints on valid codes?
|
| Did the door unlock in a valid _non-consecutive* subsequence
| like 3,4,5,0,6?
| genewitch wrote:
| No, but it would unlock with 3355 or 3455 or 3365 or 4466
| or
|
| there's 5 buttons, and the code is four of those 5 in an
| arbitrary order. at least to my memory. it could have been
| 5 buttons in an arbitrary order. It's been 20 years!
|
| 5 pick 4 = 120, so that's an upper bound for my
| recollection. I remember it being fewer than that, but the
| original "paper" was a sheet of graph paper that had been
| scanned, i just transcribed it to my palm pilot.
|
| oh. It isn't 120 * 4 keypresses. Because the thing that
| decided if the code was valid didn't have start/stop/reset
| states, so 1234523413452 would trigger 1234, 2345, 3452,
| 4523, 5234, 2341, 3413, 4134, 1345, and 3452. that would
| take "40 keypresses" in the OP "game", whereas it only
| takes 13 keypresses on these code pads.
|
| so the paper was "an" shortest permutation that covered
| every possible combination.
|
| edit: python gave a 625 keypress answer, i replied to a
| sibling with the full list of numbers.
| windward wrote:
| Is this a mean trick to snipe HN users into thinking about
| algorithms for hours? I have a friend who wants to know.
| genewitch wrote:
| python assures me this is a valid solution:
|
| >1112111311141115112211231124112511321133113411351142114311
| 44114511521153115411551212131214121512221223122412251232123
| 31234123512421243124412451252125312541255131314131513221323
| 13241325133213331334133513421343134413451352135313541355141
| 41514221423142414251432143314341435144214431444144514521453
| 14541455151522152315241525153215331534153515421543154415451
| 55215531554155522223222422252233223422352243224422452253225
| 42255232324232523332334233523432344234523532354235524242524
| 33243424352443244424452453245424552525332534253525432544254
| 52553255425553333433353344334533543355343435344434453454345
| 53535443545355435554444544554545555
|
| 625(?) presses, i was way off. :-( It's still a lot fewer
| than trying all 10,000 individual 4 digit possibilities
| that the keypad implies are there.
|
| Also this is possibly not the shortest, according to some
| sibling comments to mine, above. This could be the upper
| bound?
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| Funny how these kinds of "just messing around" problems
| sometimes turn out to have deep mathematical roots
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I'm no mathematician or leetcode expert and probably don't
| understand "shortest possible test sequence", but it sounds
| like this is just bruteforcing 0000-9999. You can't guess what
| would be closer to the correct solution, so at best I'd propose
| making a list of choices and randomizing the tries in case you
| get lucky.
|
| It's different if the keypad gives an indication that one
| number is correct though, then it'll be 40 tries at most.
| fuglede_ wrote:
| The point is that if you input, say, 00001, then you will
| have tested both 0000 and 0001.
| CJefferson wrote:
| If the code is either 0000 or 0001, then entering 00001 will
| open the door, as you just need the four digits in order.
|
| That shows how you can do a shorter sequence by using
| overlaps.
| Biganon wrote:
| Have you read the article we're commenting on? Obviously
| mathematicians know that n! * k, with k the length of the
| code, would work. The idea is to superpose the end of a code
| with the start of the next, so you don't have to test nearly
| as many combinations.
| albrewer wrote:
| > creat[e] a graph where each permutation is a vertex and every
| permutation is connected by an edge. Each edge has a weight
| associated with it; the weight is calculated by seeing how many
| characters can be added to the end of one permutation (dropping
| the same number of characters from the start) to result in the
| other permutation. [...] Any Hamiltonian path through the
| created graph is a superpermutation, and the problem of finding
| the path with the smallest weight becomes a form of the
| traveling salesman problem.
|
| From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superpermutation
| evanmoran wrote:
| This is always how it works. Large fan bases are filled with
| extremely capable people with vastly different specialties so I
| have no doubt this 4chan user had a very strong math background
| and just couldn't resist solving it for real.
| trothamel wrote:
| Oddly, the image that Scientific American chose to illustrate
| their article isn't from any of the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya
| projects, but from Aokana - Four Rhythms Across the Blue, a much
| more obscure title.
| Frotag wrote:
| Not to mention they occupy totally different mediums (anime vs
| visual novel). Kind of like using a random movie cover when
| you're talking about a music album.
| windward wrote:
| Both have anime adaptations, neither are anime original.
| endless8 wrote:
| They also close with an example for Harui's show and earlier
| try to explain its premise too... Completely ignoring the fact
| that fans don't care to watch the whole show in any order, but
| only the "Endless 8", the 8 episodes actually stuck in a time
| loop.
|
| And even making an example out of 8 episodes would be stupid,
| as the 8th episode in the Endless is meant to be the very final
| piece of the loop. It's arguable for the very first, you could
| in theory watch it out of order too, but it has the most setup
| of the bunch.
|
| So they only cared for the superpermutation of 6.
|
| Critically abysmal research on the article's part.
| prophesi wrote:
| True to an extent; there's the broadcast order versus the
| actual chronological order versus the source material order
| that all differ a good bit[0]. Broadcast order being the main
| outlier. It's an episodic series, with some that span more
| than one episode, along with Endless Eight. If anything, I'd
| say the permutations should be separated out by the first
| season and the endless eight it encompasses, as there's no
| sense in watching an endless eight episode in the midst of
| the rest.
|
| [0] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JWY_VFaF_NAxlmPkY
| sOA...
| kyorochan wrote:
| If you actually check out the original 4chan post you can
| clearly see that it's about the first season. I'm not sure
| where you got the idea that it should be about the Endless 8,
| since you even admit yourself that it would make no sense.
| Maken wrote:
| The entire Haruhi series is famously randomly scrambled, so
| neither it's airing order nor their episode number follow the
| chronological order of events.
| trothamel wrote:
| It's been a while since I saw it, but from what I remember
| the original airing was fairly intelligently scrambled. You
| have a spine of episodes that consist of the original light
| novel, which occur in the same order they did in that book.
| This introduces the characters and the main plot, and ends
| in a climax that has to be at the end.
|
| You then have a series of one-shot stories from the books
| (and one original episode contributed by the creator of
| Full Metal Panic!) that get scattered throughout, as there
| wasn't enough content for a full season, and it would be
| weird to have the climax occur mid-season.
| Two4 wrote:
| You seem well versed in anime - can I give you a few math
| proofs to work out?
| lqet wrote:
| I am not surprised that the author of this great article is Manon
| Bischoff. I have been reading her articles on Spektrum.de for
| years now, and they are always excellent. Here is a list of all
| her articles:
| https://www.spektrum.de/profil/bischoff/manon/1486871
|
| Selected articles get translated and published by SciAm:
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/author/manon-bischoff/
| cloudbonsai wrote:
| I am more surpised that the other amateur mathematian appearing
| in this article is Greg Egan (He has a personal website on
| https://www.gregegan.net/).
|
| He is one of the best contemporary hard SF writers in the
| world.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Wow. Any recommendation where to start?
| jamiek88 wrote:
| All of them but I personally love Permutation City.
| lupire wrote:
| Apropos to today's topic
| barbazoo wrote:
| thank you
| asystole wrote:
| Schild's Ladder is my personal favourite.
| barbazoo wrote:
| thank you
| senderista wrote:
| He also must be one of the best recreational mathematicians
| in the world, as anyone who follows his work on his website
| and Mastodon knows.
| hackernewds wrote:
| sometimes on HN, I cannot tell which posts are AstroTurfing
| because the praise often is so niche and unrelated and
| superlative
| turtleyacht wrote:
| Sometimes it's alright. I got motivated to dig and found
| a list of Greg Egan's non-fiction books:
|
| https://www.gregegan.net/BIBLIOGRAPHY/Bibliography.html#N
| onF...
|
| Waiting for the series _Winning Ways for Your
| Mathematical Plays_ (various authors) gets a little
| cheaper.
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| This is a talent to just make complex mathematical concepts
| feel accessible and engaging. Also thanks for sharing the
| links!
| perching_aix wrote:
| 2011 in the title would have been nice. Of course it's the Haruhi
| problem.
| asqueella wrote:
| Surprisingly there's no explanation here or in the TFA of what
| the problem actually is:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/s/2nHDIOfnBX
| SamBam wrote:
| From TFA:
|
| > If you want to watch a series in multiple arrangements--
| perhaps to figure out which sequence of episodes makes the
| most sense--you need a superpermutation. This is a sequence
| of all possible permutations. Imagine a marathon showing
| where you watch the first episode, followed by the second,
| and then watch the second episode, followed by the first
| (1-2-2-1). To avoid watching the second episode twice in a
| row, a shorter superpermutation would be 1-2-1; you would
| only have to watch three episodes to still have every
| possible order covered.
|
| > Mathematicians have also calculated the shortest
| superpermutations for a series consisting of n = 4 and n = 5
| episodes (33 and 153 episodes, respectively). Beyond that,
| however, they are in the dark. The shortest superpermutations
| for n > 5 are not known.
| layman51 wrote:
| It is funny that the article linked is from this month, but the
| actual anonymous post seems to be from 2011, and it looks like
| the research paper itself is from 2018.
| fastball wrote:
| Yeah, this has been fairly well-covered in the past, not sure
| why they decided to re-hash now.
| robswc wrote:
| Yea, that absolutely checks out.
|
| Being able to apply your work to something you enjoy is a
| discipline and motivation multiplier.
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| "Permutate"?
| userbinator wrote:
| The opposite linguistic construction to an indention.
| babuloseo wrote:
| This was done by 4chan.
| photonthug wrote:
| Now with our new understandings of super permutations, perhaps
| David Lynch's rabbits can finally make sense.
| wut-wut wrote:
| Missed an opportunity to mention she was a god and the episodes
| were already out of order.
| not2b wrote:
| I was impressed with how tight the known bounds are. For length
| 30, the upper bound is 1.0000397 times the lower bound. For 40
| the ratio is 1.0000164 and it quickly approaches 1.
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| Makes me wonder if a full solution is just around the corner or
| if there's some sneaky mathematical trick still waiting to be
| discovered
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| This is honestly one of the coolest "internet accidentally
| advances math" stories I've seen
| wodenokoto wrote:
| Clicking around the previous discussions, it appears that the
| original question was posted on /sci/, a science and math board
| on 4chan, and not an anime board, as everybody who writes about
| this states.
|
| This is apparently an archive of the original post:
|
| http://4watch.org/superstring/
|
| It's a question to a math community, using an anime meme template
| and referencing another anime. The discussion is very much not
| some anime fans having fun with a silly question, not knowing
| they are dealing with frontiers of math. Instead it is math
| enthusiast having a go at what they know is a difficult problem.
| One even links to a stackexchange question, stating that this is
| an open problem, and the poster of the link says that if they
| solve it, they should post it to arxiv.
| VVilhelmsen wrote:
| Indeed. I would even dare to say most of /sci/ don't want to be
| associated with anime at all.
| swarnie wrote:
| Unlike sites like Reddit where an overarching hivemind will
| dominate the entire site to the point where your cooking,
| gardening and Reality TV subs will all contain American
| politics for some ungodly reason, 4chan still seems to be
| siloed in to specifically focused communities.
|
| Ignore /b/, /pol/, r9k and all the weeb stuff and you can
| find some properly good communities which remind me of the
| old internet. /sci/, /mu/, /biz/ and /fit/ can all have their
| moments from time to time.
| lmpdev wrote:
| Some of the content that pops up on /t/ are extremely
| interesting from a data hoarding/lost media perspective
|
| I vaguely remember a poster having digitised his entire
| niche Serbian breakfast cartoon collection
|
| A lot falls through the rather wide cracks in legal
| distribution methods
| ChrisRR wrote:
| > Ignore the weeb stuff
|
| Good luck doing that on 4chan
| mahoho wrote:
| > Ignore the weeb stuff
|
| Go away
| swarnie wrote:
| I'd ask the boring Israeli/US boycott Muppets get off my
| graphics card benchmark sub but alas, we dont all get
| want we want.
|
| Until then you can use some 4chan boards if you ignore
| all the weeb shit.
| yifanl wrote:
| I can very confidently state /biz/ does not have its
| moments.
| Winmillion wrote:
| the rise of crypto broke that board
| tempaccount420 wrote:
| It's an anime website though.
| Sharlin wrote:
| How so? It's a very general-purpose image board and has a
| been for a long time.
| corimaith wrote:
| The two aren't contradictory, it's more that due to
| historic traditions as an offshoot of 2chan and cross-
| board culture, "otaku" culture still exerts a strong
| influence on most of the boards.
| Arnavion wrote:
| The original intent for all the boards was for anime fans to
| talk about something within their group (ie with other anime
| fans) that wasn't /a/nime itself. There's a screencap from an
| old /g/ thread on the same topic (someone complaining about
| all the weebs shitting up their board; meanwhile the board is
| literally named that because of "gijitsu"). But over time
| many of the board cultures shifted to the extent that they
| have / want very little association with anime.
| robinhouston wrote:
| I fear I'm responsible for this misconception. At first we
| didn't realise the proof had originated on 4chan - Nathaniel
| Johnston originally found the proof on Wikia, and the 4chan
| archive was only discovered later.
|
| When I tweeted about it, I said "The best known lower bound for
| the minimal length of superpermutations was proved by an
| anonymous user of a wiki mainly devoted to anime.", by which I
| meant Wikia (which was pretty anime-centric at the time).
|
| I think, combined with the fact that the problem was posed to
| 4chan in terms of Haruhi, and because it makes a funnier story,
| that the anime angle has been a bit exaggerated.
|
| Having said that, the author of the proof is not (to the best
| of my knowledge) a mathematician, nor does he have any apparent
| desire to publish his result in a conventional form, so it's
| still a pretty unexpected place for such a result to originate.
| throwaway37725 wrote:
| >At first we didn't realise the proof had originated on 4chan
| - Nathaniel Johnston originally found the proof on Wikia
|
| >by an anonymous user of a wiki mainly devoted to anime.", by
| which I meant Wikia (which was pretty anime-centric at the
| time).
|
| The Wikia in question is the official 4chan /sci/ Wikia.
| robinhouston wrote:
| I know. My description was aimed at people who had never
| heard of Wikia, and certainly didn't understand its
| substructure. But I realise it sounds wrong to people like
| you who do understand that, and I wish I'd worded it more
| carefully.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| 4chan has more valuable information than Reddit. Reddit has a
| lot of echo chambers with useless information
| ergl wrote:
| Calling 4chan an anime board is probably accurate, it started
| as a copy of 2chan, which was anime-focused. Taking a cursory
| look at the catalog of most boards on the site will confirm
| this, you will find an anime reaction pic with high
| probability.
| Arnavion wrote:
| The archive of the post is linked in the mathsci.wikia.com
| page: https://warosu.org/sci/thread/S3751105#p3751197
| wodenokoto wrote:
| Slightly offtopic: Has anyone tried watching Melancholy of Haruhi
| Suzumiya in a random order?
|
| Does it tell a story with a beginning and an end? Or is it more
| like season 1 of the Simpsons, which you could also watch in any
| order you want.
| junon wrote:
| > The researchers posted their mathematical work to the Online
| Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences that same month, and the first
| author is listed as "Anonymous 4chan Poster."
|
| I love the internet.
| a1o wrote:
| Any recommendations on how to write stories where the chapters
| could be read in any other? I am curious how such thing could
| work.
| dealbreaker wrote:
| I haven't seen any Haruhi references in about as much time yeah,
| it was insanely popular back in the day.
|
| Haruhi, 4chan, been a while.
| lupire wrote:
| Misleading rehash of (2011-2018) story.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| isn't this solved even on ancient east asian texts? and several
| other times on recent history?
|
| i even found this much more interesting use searching for the
| name of the proofs https://hackaday.com/tag/ford-securicode/
| phkahler wrote:
| I played around with a related problem - find the shortest string
| containing every binary number of length n. There are 2^n
| substrings, and I seem to recall being able to to do it in 2^n +
| n - 1 bits. In other words, perfect overlap was possible at least
| up to n=10.
|
| I was interested in this because it's an optimal way to plot
| Julia sets by running the iteration backward and choosing one or
| the other square root. To visit all parts of the outline you'd
| want to apply every sequence of root selection (positive or
| negative) up to some length. Doing it at random is cool, but for
| a fixed number of points you want one of these sequences.
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