Superpermutations: the maths problem solved by 4chan
1,105,617
Published 2019-01-28
groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/superpermutators
This is where Robin Houston does his real job: Flourish Data Visualisation
flourish.studio/
James Grime's video: Superpermutations - Numberphile
• Superpermutations - Numberphile
A lower bound on the length of the shortest superpattern
Anonymous 4chan Poster, Robin Houston, Jay Pantone, and Vince Vatter
oeis.org/A180632/a180632.pdf
"The Haruhi Problem"
More formally, "what is the shortest string containing all permutations of a set of n elements?"
mathsci.wikia.com/wiki/The_Haruhi_Problem
Archived 4chan post. If you don't know what 4chan is: click with caution.
warosu.org/sci/thread/S3751105#p3751197
Nathaniel Johnston: "The Minimal Superpermutation Problem"
www.njohnston.ca/2013/04/the-minimal-superpermutat…
Superpermutations by Greg Egan
www.gregegan.net/SCIENCE/Superpermutations/Superpe…
Robin's tweet:
"A curious situation. The best known lower bound for the minimal length of superpermutations was proved by an anonymous user of a wiki mainly devoted to anime."
twitter.com/robinhouston/status/105463789108591820…
LKH: Lin-Kernighan heuristic for solving the traveling salesman problem
akira.ruc.dk/~keld/research/LKH/
CORRECTIONS
- Not yet. Let me know if you spot anything!
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All Comments (21)
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Hello. It’s me, the hairy man in the video. Sadly I don’t have much progress to report since this was filmed at the end of October. I managed to improve the 4chan lower bound by one, but I think it’s fair to say we’re pretty stuck again after a period of rapid progress and wild optimism. We still haven’t been able to bring the upper bound down by one, but I still reckon it should be possible. I’m hoping someone here will have some good ideas!
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I'd just like to point out that Anon did the maths because he wanted to know the fastest possible way to watch an anime if you wanted to watch every episode in every possible order.
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So, what you're saying is, we can solve all the world's problems by rephrasing them so they're related to anime and posting them to 4chan.
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please change "anonymous 4 Chan user" to on the paper "Anon" and write the paper as a green text
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the mathematician known as 4chan
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The feeling you get as a serious mathematician when you include "anonymous 4chan poster" on a paper you're writing must be something special.
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Greg Egan could be shortened to Gregan as that contains both Greg and Egan
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4chan has some very sharp math geeks. I've discussed the 2D pyramid formula and they immediately provided a simpler version of what I had.
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Gives Anonymous 4chan poster credit in a mathematical paper Ah... I see you're a man of culture as well.
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"So... i've also brought some F's!" "Please stop"
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Really goes to show the importance of being able to freely share information across the globe.
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For anyone wondering why the proof appeared on an anime wiki of all places: "The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya" is an anime which has multiple orders in which it can be watched (the main two are broadcast order and chronological order). This question is a joke asking how many episodes you would need to watch in order to see every possible watch order. #copied from a reddit post comment
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Will anyone stop the hacker known as 4chan?
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People on 4chan be out there schooling mathematicians, meanwhile on Facebook people argue over 2+2(6-1)
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thank the lord for that fix at 12:10, was driving me crazy
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This is legit fascinating. I got chills when Robin said "an anonymous poster gave a solution that was better than anything in the literature." Amazing.
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Phew, that arrow got fixed! Almost had to make a comment about that Parker Arrow. Oh, wait...
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Imagine being so self confident you do something amazing and post it anonymously because you don’t care
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There's an important lesson here: if you wanna get people interested in math, you just need to show them how it applies to stuff they already care about. (Oh, and if you wanna motivate people, anime girls will do the trick. That's another lesson to take away here.)
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Plot twist: He is actually writing on a TV screen.
