Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Anime fans stumbled upon a mathematical proof

scientificamerican.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 255 posts

Re: Anime fans stumbled upon a mathematical proof

#171

Post by wodenokoto »

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.

Re: Anime fans stumbled upon a mathematical proof

#172

Post by fc417fc802 »

somenameforme wrote: post #145
dumbfounder wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

10^4 permutations. Which you then permute again except the second time you're overlapping them to search for the shortest possible sequence.

Re: Anime fans stumbled upon a mathematical proof

#173

Post by cyborgx7 »

t-3 wrote: post #59
rootsudo wrote: post #33

Woah, Haruhi is now considered classic.

Calling Haruhi classic isn't that bad - I've seen people on this site referring to 2010s-era hardware as "retro".

When the AVGN started out, the SNES was roughly as old as the PS3 is now.

Re: Anime fans stumbled upon a mathematical proof

#174

Post by arkh »

dylan604 wrote: post #19
tombert wrote: post #5

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...

> 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.

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.

Re: Anime fans stumbled upon a mathematical proof

#175

Post by kyorochan »

endless8 wrote: post #130
trothamel wrote: post #53

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.

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 th…

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.

Re: Anime fans stumbled upon a mathematical proof

#176

Post by jamiek88 »

barbazoo wrote: post #154
cloudbonsai wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wow. Any recommendation where to start?

All of them but I personally love Permutation City.

Re: Anime fans stumbled upon a mathematical proof

#178

Post by t-3 »

tstrimple wrote: post #158
somenameforme wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 answ…

> 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 anonymi…

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.

Re: Anime fans stumbled upon a mathematical proof

#179

Post by KennyBlanken »

ecshafer wrote: post #63
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #24

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 accompl…

> 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.

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.

Re: Anime fans stumbled upon a mathematical proof

#180

Post by Cthulhu_ »

tombert wrote: post #5

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...

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)

Post reply on HN