An Anonymous 4chan Post Helped Solve a 25-Year-Old Math Puzzle (2018)

This is one of my favorite stories. There is some good info on the superpermutations problem (which is now known as the Haruhi problem when looking for the lower bound of 14) here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superpermutation#Lower_bounds,...

This has the original proof that appeared on /sci/:

https://mathsci.fandom.com/wiki/The_Haruhi_Problem

And here is a paper authored in part by "Anonymous 4chan Poster": https://oeis.org/A180632/a180632.pdf

/sci/ is a weird place, but there are some extremely brilliant, bored minds there. They published a guide: https://sites.google.com/site/scienceandmathguide/ that was great for me as an undergrad.

An interesting use case of superpermutations is for password cracking on devices that use rolling codes. I recall Samy kamkar using de bruijn's sequence to more quickly find the unlock code for garage doors [1]. Not sure what the difference between the de bruijn sequence [2] and superpermutations are though.

[1] http://samy.pl/opensesame/ [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Bruijn_sequence

(2018)