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Anime fans stumbled upon a mathematical proof
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Re: Anime fans stumbled upon a mathematical proof
#32There'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...
> 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.
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.
Re: Anime fans stumbled upon a mathematical proof
#33Woah, Haruhi is now considered classic.
Re: Anime fans stumbled upon a mathematical proof
#34Loath 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 accompl…
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
Re: Anime fans stumbled upon a mathematical proof
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
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> Why it would be something extra ordinary? You give screenshot, date... Journalists do it all the time: "evil X are attacking Y while doing Z". It's just funny. I usually associate 4chan as primarily shitposting. Memes and offensive-stuff-for-the-sake-of-being-offensive and porn. You don't generally see mathematical work being done on there.
Visited 4chan twice about 5 years apart, saw CSAM both times. I have an absolute hatred of the place rightly or wrongly.
Re: Anime fans stumbled upon a mathematical proof
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used 4chan for cooking and dietary stuff. It was a huge site, something like reddit. Math stuff was very strong there, I think you just never visited this site!
I have visited the site, but mostly just hung around in /b/. I didn't really check out any of the other forums on there. I could be wrong, but I think that the average non-active-4chan-user associates 4chan primarily with /b/.
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Re: Anime fans stumbled upon a mathematical proof
#37I 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 sett…
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 al…
> 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.
Re: Anime fans stumbled upon a mathematical proof
#38Should not the de Bruijn sequence work somehow for this problem? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Bruijn_sequence
That would give you some string that contains all the permutations, but definitely not the shortest such string.
Re: Anime fans stumbled upon a mathematical proof
#39At 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.
Re: Anime fans stumbled upon a mathematical proof
#40Previous 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,...
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