This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
Be warned:
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
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.
Is this number the exact result or a lower bound ?
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
Get started anon!
But one person can only see one order. Unless you erase your memory
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.
But you don't start from the beginning each time.
More of a philosophical question I suppose, not mathematical
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
"The hacker named 4chan"
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
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.
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.
Thanks, the article piqued my interest and after hearing all this I might have to check it out.
Just dont h8 it
Is that different from this one I remember watching years ago? https://youtu.be/OZzIvl1tbPo
Note I'm not really.. Good at math nor really understand it.
I'll still watch an entertainer and someone good at what they do for entertainment either way.
Same here. Another math-centric channel that's super interesting is Numberphile. Binged a lot of those
