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

231–240 of 255 posts

Re: Anime fans stumbled upon a mathematical proof

#231

Post by ergl »

wodenokoto wrote: post #171

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…

Calling 4chan an anime board is probably accurate, it started as a copy of 2chan, which was anime-focused. Taking a cursory look at the catalog of most boards on the site will confirm this, you will find an anime reaction pic with high probability.

Re: Anime fans stumbled upon a mathematical proof

#232

Post by seanw444 »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #184
seanw444 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to enjoy the banter on 4chan more than here. Everyone is expected to dish it and take it there. Peoples' biases are obvious, because they make it clear who they dislike fairly often. Nobody actually takes any real offense to it all. It's quite pleasant compared to the sanitized world of... literally anywhere else. Of course, if seeing the N word makes you obsessively clutch pearls, then it's not the place for…

"If you can ignore the rampant homophobia, misogyny, racism, organized harassment campaigns, doxxing, and high level state official kidnapping conspiracies, it's a great place to hang out!" ...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.

You just described why it's unique, and then claimed it's not unique. It's clearly not your cup of tea.

Re: Anime fans stumbled upon a mathematical proof

#233

Post by seanw444 »

dokyun wrote: post #105
seanw444 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to enjoy the banter on 4chan more than here. Everyone is expected to dish it and take it there. Peoples' biases are obvious, because they make it clear who they dislike fairly often. Nobody actually takes any real offense to it all. It's quite pleasant compared to the sanitized world of... literally anywhere else. Of course, if seeing the N word makes you obsessively clutch pearls, then it's not the place for…

An issue I have with imageboards is that use of images invites low-effort posting because it makes it easy to be as annoying as possible, whereas with pure text making inflammatory remarks at least takes some forethought, and it invites unique forms of creative writing. Anonymous textboards I think have the best forms of banter, but they're dying out these days. Over here people have incentives to appease others by g…

The low-effort posting (AKA shitposting) is part of what makes it great. It's kind of an acquired taste, but there's a certain humor to it.

Re: Anime fans stumbled upon a mathematical proof

#234

Post by swarnie »

mahoho wrote: post #208
swarnie wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike sites like Reddit where an overarching hivemind will dominate the entire site to the point where your cooking, gardening and Reality TV subs will all contain American politics for some ungodly reason, 4chan still seems to be siloed in to specifically focused communities. 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…

> Ignore the weeb stuff Go away

I'd ask the boring Israeli/US boycott Muppets get off my graphics card benchmark sub but alas, we dont all get want we want.

Until then you can use some 4chan boards if you ignore all the weeb shit.

Re: Anime fans stumbled upon a mathematical proof

#235

Post by artistic_regard »

mahoho wrote: post #208
swarnie wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike sites like Reddit where an overarching hivemind will dominate the entire site to the point where your cooking, gardening and Reality TV subs will all contain American politics for some ungodly reason, 4chan still seems to be siloed in to specifically focused communities. 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…

> Ignore the weeb stuff Go away

[dead]

Re: Anime fans stumbled upon a mathematical proof

#236

Post by turtleyacht »

hackernewds wrote: post #161
senderista wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He also must be one of the best recreational mathematicians in the world, as anyone who follows his work on his website and Mastodon knows.

sometimes on HN, I cannot tell which posts are AstroTurfing because the praise often is so niche and unrelated and superlative

Sometimes it's alright. I got motivated to dig and found a list of Greg Egan's non-fiction books:

https://www.gregegan.net/BIBLIOGRAPHY/Bibliography.html#NonF...

Waiting for the series Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays (various authors) gets a little cheaper.

Re: Anime fans stumbled upon a mathematical proof

#237

Post by SamBam »

genewitch wrote: post #143
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.

Or it's 10000?

That's the number of possible codes. Not the number of possible ways you could arrange all 10000 codes to see which ordering contains the most shortcuts.

Re: Anime fans stumbled upon a mathematical proof

#238

Post by SamBam »

asqueella wrote: post #125
perching_aix wrote: post #67

2011 in the title would have been nice. Of course it's the Haruhi problem.

Surprisingly there’s no explanation here or in the TFA of what the problem actually is: https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/s/2nHDIOfnBX

From TFA:

> 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.

Re: Anime fans stumbled upon a mathematical proof

#239

Post by albrewer »

bntyhntr wrote: post #39

At 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…

> creat[e] a graph where each permutation is a vertex and every permutation is connected by an edge. Each edge has a weight associated with it; the weight is calculated by seeing how many characters can be added to the end of one permutation (dropping the same number of characters from the start) to result in the other permutation. [...] Any Hamiltonian path through the created graph is a superpermutation, and the problem of finding the path with the smallest weight becomes a form of the traveling salesman problem.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superpermutation

Re: Anime fans stumbled upon a mathematical proof

#240

Post by Arnavion »

wodenokoto wrote: post #171

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…

The archive of the post is linked in the mathsci.wikia.com page: https://warosu.org/sci/thread/S3751105#p3751197
Post reply on HN