Anime fans stumbled upon a mathematical proof
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
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.
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.
>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.
4chan dates back from a time where you'd have, say, forums for people who like X, and that forum might also have off-topic boards for stuff like food, travel, politics, and other off-topic discussion. While there are people who are interested in specific topics in said boards, everyone on the site across all boards are expected to like X.
As 4chan is wide open and due to the existence of /b/, there is thus a constant flow of people who aren't anime fans whinging about anime in the non-anime boards, who are generally ignored or rebuked.
I haven't been a regular visitor for some years, so some cultural loss might be expected, but certainly at the time that this happened, 4chan was still solidly an anime community.
Here are a few examples (which also demonstrate that while it's hard to define 4chan users in any way simply because it's an undefined set of random people that might visit and leave at any time, the only commonality would that most (not all; the so-call "redditors"/"tourists") are anime fans:
https://4archive.org/board/qa/thread/382065/whats-the-deal-w...
https://4archive.org/board/qa/thread/564357/its-acceptable-t...
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.
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
Good luck doing that on 4chan
Go away
Until then you can use some 4chan boards if you ignore all the weeb shit.
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.
The character is actually from Steins;Gate, not The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya: https://steins-gate.fandom.com/wiki/Kurisu_Makise
https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=%22You%20should%20be%2...
Selected articles get translated and published by SciAm: https://www.scientificamerican.com/author/manon-bischoff/
He is one of the best contemporary hard SF writers in the world.
https://www.gregegan.net/BIBLIOGRAPHY/Bibliography.html#NonF...
Waiting for the series Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays (various authors) gets a little cheaper.
What does that involve? does that mean he's good at math or is he coming up with new research and theorems and such?
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.
[0] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JWY_VFaF_NAxlmPkYsOA...
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.
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...
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.
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.
On the other hand, it is nice and convenient if everything is indexed.
I dunno. Conflicted.
Still, I do wonder what cool (and real) stuff on the internet that people don't really know about is actually significant.
Lot of technical communities are there nowadays, lot of ideas are just out of view from anything public.
Phrack probably has hundreds or maybe thousands of citations to it at this point.
(It's a fun bit of lore that she was once on /b)
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)
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.
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
>111211131114111511221123112411251132113311341135114211431144114511521153115411551212131214121512221223122412251232123312341235124212431244124512521253125412551313141315132213231324132513321333133413351342134313441345135213531354135514141514221423142414251432143314341435144214431444144514521453145414551515221523152415251532153315341535154215431544154515521553155415552222322242225223322342235224322442245225322542255232324232523332334233523432344234523532354235524242524332434243524432444244524532454245525253325342535254325442545255325542555333343335334433453354335534343534443445345434553535443545355435554444544554545555
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?
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?
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.
It's different if the keypad gives an indication that one number is correct though, then it'll be 40 tries at most.
That shows how you can do a shorter sequence by using overlaps.
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.
> 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.
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?)
There's a lot of people like that in maths. Very talented but dropping in and out of it or doing it recreationally.
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.
I love the internet.
Haruhi, 4chan, been a while.
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.
i even found this much more interesting use searching for the name of the proofs https://hackaday.com/tag/ford-securicode/
Being able to apply your work to something you enjoy is a discipline and motivation multiplier.
But the phrasing almost implies it's not a true accomplishment because "scientists" didn't discover it.
Reddit has shades of this, but it was never truly focused. The upvote system kills small discussions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why, whats wrong with 4chan? Outside of /pol/ and /b/ its just an image board with many different users.
The issue is it's not a fun website. The creative spark is gone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boogaloo_movement
...also, a huge number of mass shooters have been 4chan regulars...
I love the fact we have somewhere unambiguously lowbrow on the internet. It's fun to watch how highbrow places talk about it.
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.
For what it's worth, copypastas are the highest (and likely the oldest) form of meme.
...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.
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.
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.
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.
Thank you Manon Bischoff (author), Daisy Yuhas (editor), and Scientific American for giving me this to think about.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Bear in mind this is a magazine that published complete plans for building an argon laser in your garage. Including the glassblowing.
I do sometimes wonder if I should get a current subscription to get access to the archive though.