• Steve Dice@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    521·
    2 days ago

    I hate how every article written about it seemed hell bent into trying to make it look like it was some random weeb who channeled his love for anime to come up with a proof when most people in that thread were mathematicians who knew exactly what they were trying to prove. The board is literally called Science & Math. Fucking journalists, man.

    • jabathekek@sopuli.xyzOP
      20·
      2 days ago

      mathematicians who knew exactly what they were trying to prove.

      *weeb mathematicians who knew exactly what they were trying to prove and channelled their love for Haruhi to come up with a proof

      • Steve Dice@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        71·
        2 days ago

        Well, yeah, it’s 4chan, that’s a given. What I’m trying to say is that it wasn’t some Good Will Hunting situation. It was competent people doing what they do for a living.

        • jabathekek@sopuli.xyzOP
          5·
          2 days ago

          Yeah. Good Will Hunting scripts make money…

          I’m also not a fan of the title. They didn’t “stumble upon” the proof, they walked directly towards it lol.

    • Contramuffin@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      2 days ago

      I don’t personally think Anon knew exactly what he was trying to prove (otherwise he would have published the proof already), but it is definitely true that the problem was posted on a forum that specifically catered to people with the kinds of skillsets that would be capable of solving these problems. Most likely Anon probably just saw this as a simple math challenge without any deeper meaning

      • Steve Dice@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        3·
        2 days ago

        Everyone else in the thread was talking about the traveling salesman. I won’t completely rule out that he, personally, didn’t know because mathematicians are weird af and it is possible that he came to the thread, didn’t read any comment on it and just posted the solution, but it would be very strange.

  • 🔍🦘🛎@lemmy.worldEnglish
    34·
    2 days ago

    Additional context for the uninitiated: the series “The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya” was aired out of sequence intentionally, which is to say that the episide order is not the chronological order of events. The show is a masterclass of storytelling, presenting just enough information for the viewer to follow the episode’s plot while leaving you constantly guessing and inferring information about the series as a whole, since you learn plot details at a different pace than the protagonist. The show never tells you the episode’s chronological place, but it can be determined through observation of details such as season, references to other events, etc.

    The reason this discussion started is because people began recommending others to watch the series in chronological order, and other orders were also popularized. So Anon seems to have been seeking a method to list all possible orders as a logical conclusion of the practice.

    Highly recommended for even non-anime fans, it’s a great sci-fi comedy/drama/mystery. I personally recommend the original airing order.

  • karpintero@lemmy.world
    61·
    3 days ago

    Some interesting bits from the article:

    Anon is credited as the first author in the paper

    Computers are able to calculate superpermutations for n = 4 and n = 5 but not for anything beyond that.

    Since the series in question has 14 episodes, it would take 93,884,313,611 episodes to see all possible combinations. Or roughly 4 million years of non-stop viewing.

      • karpintero@lemmy.world
        34·
        3 days ago

        Lower. It caught their attention because a science fiction author had come up with upper bound, which the article notes was also bizarre.

        Houston had just learned that Australian science fiction author Greg Egan had found a new maximum length for the shortest superpermutations

      • Hugin@lemmy.world
        3·
        2 days ago

        You can watch it again in a different order.

        This is mostly about minimizing the number of viewings. So for a 3 episode series you can get order ABC and order BCA in 4 viewings instead of 6 by watching in order ABCA.

        • Evotech@lemmy.world
          2·
          2 days ago

          But you don’t start from the beginning each time.

          More of a philosophical question I suppose, not mathematical

          • L0rdMathias@sh.itjust.works
            3·
            2 days ago

            There is not really a concept of a “true beginning” in this type of mathematics. The beginning is defined to be wherever you start.

            Where does a circle start and end? Every point on a circle is both the beginning and the end of that circle. The math of permutations and combinatorials are closely related to the geometry of circles and because of that they take on a lot of similar properties. Another way to phase this question is “If I have a set of beads that are all the same size but different colors, and I want to chain multiple beads of different colors together using specific limited pallets of colors to make bracelets, what is the bracelet with the smallest size where after one rotation around the bracelet I will have seen every possible combination of the set of colors used in the pallet for that bracelet.” If that sounds confusing, it’s because it is.