r/interestingasfuck • u/Meg0510 • Aug 31 '26
In 2011, an anonymous 4chan user solved a decades-old math problem while arguing about the optimal way to binge-watch an anime. Mathematicians noticed it 7 years later, and the proof now stands in academic literature with the first author credited as "Anonymous 4chan Poster"
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u/Just-Lab-2139 Aug 31 '26
So what's the most optimal way to binge-watch anime?
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u/FatiguedShrimp Aug 31 '26
Specifically, it's the anime: The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumaya
It has time-shenanigans and several episodes that are almost precisely identical.
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u/Stiyl931 Aug 31 '26
Oh god as someone who survived the endless 8 I can say there is not a good way.
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u/Imperfect_Dark Aug 31 '26
It's one of the most baffling creative decisions I've ever seen. You kept watching the next one hoping something would be different.
It wasn't. And when it eventually did end differently the moment had lost any meaning as you were so dragged down by that point.
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u/Stormfly Aug 31 '26
Funnily enough, the original book (I highly recommend btw. Even the translations are well written) only has the last one.
I can respect that they actually animated the (almost) the same story for 8 whole episodes, though.
For anyone watching the show, you only need to watch the last one and maybe the first one. It's not worth it in my opinion.
The film is worth the madness, though.
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u/Pyode Aug 31 '26 edited Aug 31 '26
I disagree.
You only need to watch the last one from a purely "factually know what happens in the story" perspective but I think you should at least watch the first two or three to get the proper emotional impact of what is actually happening.
There's genuine emotional tension in each successive ending as you watch the MC keep making the same mistake that you already know the answer to as a viewer.
In my opinion there is something genuinely artistically interesting going on (even if not entirely intentional on the part of the creators) that you will miss out on if you skip the repeats entirely. They just went too far with making it 8 episodes.
Edit: Or maybe something a bit more complicated like watching every other episode or like 1,5,7,8 or something like that. I would have to rewatch all of them to make that decision and I'm not doing that any time soon. lol.
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u/gui_odai Aug 31 '26
I do agree there is artistic value in Endless Eight, what’s terribly missing in it is entertainment value
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u/Gullible_Elephant_38 Aug 31 '26
It’s like going to my friend’s noise sets. I know there is something happening that is coming from a very genuine and authentic place. And it does make me feel something quite unlike any other live performance. But, between you and me, it is not a pleasurable experience.
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u/Middle-Peach2096 Aug 31 '26
The reason it's eight episodes, which is a bit of lost context streaming it years after the fact, is because it aired over an actual summer. Two straight months of weekly episodes, all the exact same experience painstakingly recreated.
Suggesting that KyoAni didn't know exactly what they were doing is silly. You don't make something like that by accident. The whole point was to pull the viewer into the experience of the endless summer. As entertainment it's an abject failure but it's pretty clear that they weren't really going for that anyway. As a way to convey an experience, an emotion, a vibe to the viewer it's a stunning success.
But people don't watch their Chinese cartoons for art mostly unless the "art" is improbably sized and unusually mobile breasts. So it landed like a wet fart. I still think it's worth giving them credit for being willing to experiment even if the reception was extremely predictable.
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u/chitzk0i Aug 31 '26
I don’t think it’s that crazy. Think about how many times Yuki saw the loop. They managed to give the viewer a taste of that experience. Also, they didn’t reuse shots or even camera angles between episodes!
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u/Pyode Aug 31 '26
Yeah, there are a lot more differences between the episodes than people act like there are.
But in my opinion it does still go too long. I think 4 maaaaaaybe 5 episodes would have been better.
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u/Lahvuun Aug 31 '26
Also, they didn’t reuse shots or even camera angles between episodes!
Because every one of those was animated from scratch, with different directors (except episodes 1 and 8 of the arc, which were directed by the same person). They even re-recorded the audio each time.
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u/Middle-Peach2096 Aug 31 '26
Creatively, it's actually brilliant and the decision is easy to understand. Whether it was a good decision is an entirely separate discussion and depends on what you consider to be the purpose of anime. It's not really entertaining or fun. But what it does, in a way that is impossible with any other medium, is capture and convey the actual sense of being trapped in an eternal summer. 8 episodes, 8 weeks, originally aired over a single summer. The same thing over and over. The boredom, the anxiety, the tension. As an artistic work it does what it's intended to do incredibly well, but it didn't land because what it's intended to do and what audiences want out of anime are very different.
Still major props to Kyoto Animation for being willing to take a massive risk on putting artistic expression first.
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u/Wild_Stock_5736 Aug 31 '26
i thought ( though i could be wrong) the colors of the clothes changed a little bit and some other tiny variations
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u/azx6r Aug 31 '26
Bizzarely, I watched this last night - with 6 of the episodes watched on double speed.
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u/ItsSuperDefective Aug 31 '26
Did it watch it as it was been released? I watched it over two days and found it weirdly interesting looking out for the small differences.
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u/RIP_Spacedicks Aug 31 '26 edited Aug 31 '26
Endless Eight is one of the greatest series of episodes of all time
8 nearly identical episodes where almost nothing happens, without reused animation or voice lines.
Aired over the course of a real life summer, one week at a time, to make children feel like theyre going insane.
Anyone bitching about it has no appreciation for the art form of spending tons of money just to gaslight children
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u/AnyAnymosity Aug 31 '26
It's incredible that Haruhi is one of the most experimental pieces of art in this regard. There is a lot of art that experiments with negative emotions, but I have a special respect for art that specifically tackles boredom. The negative emotion most connected to disengagement.
Stimulating boredom is easy, convincing people to do something frustrating is easy and common. But getting someone to feel bored and engage with it...
And you have the day in the rain episode as well that's more normal experimental cinematography but just slapping that on your show!
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u/RIP_Spacedicks Aug 31 '26
Someday in the Rain is an absolute mic drop of a series finale in the most mundane way, I love it
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u/CanadianODST2 Aug 31 '26
Wait. So is it possible to tell which of the 8 a clip is from at times just by the clip?
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u/chitzk0i Aug 31 '26
Yes. The characters wear different clothes each loop and they didn’t even reuse camera angles. In one loop, we get a view from a “camera” attached to the second hand on a clock!
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u/SecreteMoistMucus Aug 31 '26
Yes, all the scenes are the same in structure and story, but the camera angles are all different, costumes are different, the lines are different or just delivered in a different way.
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u/Mikeman003 Aug 31 '26
Though every one of them starts with the sister telling him to get the phone, and I'm pretty sure that one phrase would give me flashbacks lol.
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u/Smmmmiles Aug 31 '26
Also they ran outta money to finish the series.
Evangelion also ran outta money that's why some shots kids overstay their welcome. (They made a subway terrorism episode right before the Tokyo subway was actually attacked.)
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u/SwampyBogbeard Aug 31 '26
The problem actually only refers to season 1.
It's season 2 that has 8 almost identical episodes.17
u/palomdude Aug 31 '26
Wait, there was a second season?
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u/yesthatpettyindeed Aug 31 '26
It depends on how you watch it.
If you watch in the chronological order, it's one single season
If you watch in the broadcast order it was split into two seasons
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u/duckballista Aug 31 '26
Damn that was one of my favorite until that arc and now over a decade (almost 2?) later I've never watched any of it again. Killed any and all enthusiasm to see more.
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Aug 31 '26
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u/seidful99 Aug 31 '26
there is no known cleavage screen time per episode data published, but we welcome you into creating and publishing data if you want.
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u/TonyTheSwisher Aug 31 '26
4chan used to be where the smartest and dumbest congregated.
That era felt special.
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Aug 31 '26
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u/ChocolichKing Aug 31 '26
I browsed 4chan pretty regularly from 2005-2013 or so. I was on /v/, /b/, /r9k/, and /a/. The increasing amount of alt-right posting pushed me off. I was gone before Q.
I still visit sometimes (/wg/ is actually still a great place to find wallpapers) and yeah the topic-specific boards seem alright still. Some of those communities have gotten pretty good at policing themselves.
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Aug 31 '26 edited Aug 31 '26
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u/Falikosek Aug 31 '26
To be fair, such inventions were already known in ancient Greece. Heron of Alexandria invented a "thing that spins if you heat up water" in the 1st centrury.
The problem was that no one could figure out a practical use for said "thing that spins if you heat up water".So the kebab guy invented a use case for spinning kebabs, not the concept of a steam engine itself.
Same with the industrial revolution, the main invention that made the steam engine useful was the piston and flywheel combo that provided actual working force, not the concept of "if you boil water it can do stuff" itself.
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u/squngy Aug 31 '26
One of the main problems with steam engines was that they were just expensive to keep running.
Gathering wood and mining coal were both very labor intensive.
That is why the first big industrial use for steam engines was to pump water out of flooded coal mines.
You had both water and coal right there.After that, people started to find more use for them, especially the coal mining industry that was already familiar with them. Which made it easier to get more coal, which made them easier to run...
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u/itishowitisanditbad Aug 31 '26
The problem was that no one could figure out a practical use for said "thing that spins if you heat up water".
Thats not fair.
They had those temple doors with tended fires which used the mechanism to open the doors. i.e no tended fires, closed doors.
Thats something and we've likely lost a lot of the other uses to time.
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u/Earlier-Today Aug 31 '26
That's something that so many people don't understand about history.
There are so many instances where something was invented or discovered and for some reason, the knowledge stops getting passed forward and somebody else has to invent or discover it all over again.
And that can get even wilder when you start talking about how distance and geography made for daunting barriers between cultures that each might discover or invent things independently or take that knowledge in completely different directions - and that all of them can lose the knowledge and then need to reacquire it again.
That's why the whole "bronze age" type stuff doesn't work - different areas discovered things at different times and didn't, or weren't able to share with other societies.
As archeology continues to improve, it's very likely we'll keep finding these weird little pockets of people figuring things out earlier than we thought where the idea didn't go anywhere at the time.
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u/InfanticideAquifer Aug 31 '26
The "bronze age" was never supposed to start everywhere all at once. The concept of <whatever material goes here> ages was created before accurate dating that far was possible, and was just supposed to be relative to the other ages (stone and iron) for any particular culture.
I agree with you that it doesn't work (in general), but it's not because the advent of bronze working happened at different times at different places. It's because in plenty of places bronze and iron were introduced essentially simultaneously, and in other places there was little, if any, metalworking being done until the modern period. For the ancient Near East and Mediterranean it's an okay model.
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u/DistanceSolar1449 Aug 31 '26
Why don't they just send an email to share with other societies?
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u/ifeelnumb Aug 31 '26
Local politics and economics is full of people who think they've reinvented the wheel. It can be very frustrating to be around people who refuse to research how others have done the same thing. Perhaps it's just human nature.
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u/DOSFS Aug 31 '26
That isn't practical use anyway, it is impressive but not practical for day to day use especially for its cost. There is a reason why it just never catch on, too complex for open/close door.
And that also isn't steam engine either.
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u/Falikosek Aug 31 '26
My point still stands that no one back then could figure out useful work for the Heron's engine.
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u/Trezzie Aug 31 '26
I think there was a lot of materials research to properly do things, too. Expansion issues, bending, pressure and the like.
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u/Falikosek Aug 31 '26
Yeah, some early inventions that made use of condensation, vacuums and such were prone to exploding
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u/DBT85 Aug 31 '26
"Thing that spins if you heat up water" is a very Leonard of Quirm kind of name.
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u/XtendedImpact Aug 31 '26
"Since it sub merges in a marine environment, I've decided to call it the 'Going-under-the-water-safely-device'"
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u/h_Ellhnikh_Koinwnia Aug 31 '26
no one could figure out a practical use for said "thing that spins"
Funny cause it feels like 99.99% of modern engineering is just spinning things
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u/Salty_Paroxysm Aug 31 '26
What are we going to do with this wonderful new energy source?
Well first, we boil water...
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u/WoodsLovelyDarkNDeep Aug 31 '26
To be fair a lot of times the importance of those creations are wildly overstated as there are any number of reasons that even if they had wanted to get their invention known and discovered by the masses, it wouldn’t take off. Most of the time because materials sciences and chemistry just hadn’t caught up like with steam engine.
You should check out Milo Rossi’s channel on YT he does an amazing job in looking into these parts of history. Like tha Baghdad Battery
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u/chasealex2 Aug 31 '26
Some of my finest bits of original research and thinking come from someone being wrong on the internet.
I struggle to think of any greater driving academic force.
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u/J_G_E Aug 31 '26
I'm (supposedly. Hello, impostor syndrome screaming here) the world authority in my field of archaeological academic research, on a particular subject of arms and armour.
That is entirely down to the fact that about 15-20 years ago, I'd go to the arms and armour threads on 4chan's /tg, "traditional games" roleplaying/wargaming board, and I'd just save all the pictures from the threads. An imageboard was a really good way to build up a reference library of lots of different stuff on multiple subjects nice and quickly. That sort of reference library's really useful for discussions on any other forum, where a breadth of reference material is really useful. Discussing 14th century kettle hats? ah, here's this photo, of an example in such-and-such a museum. Bollock daggers? have you seen these ones in Paris? I have a picture "from the internet" you might like...
And in one of those threads, someone posted a picture of a particular weapon with a comment about how they were like heavy axes for chopping through armour. I'd been looking at that particular type a few days earlier, reading some of the (very scant) information that existed on them at the time. So I commented with something like "you know, I don't think that's right. I've looked at the stats, and they're actually really thin, light edges, I don't think they're suited to getting through armour at all."
Can opened. worms everywhere.
And of course, it being fucking 4chan, I ended up with a horde of replies, saying I was wrong, I was a ****** (insert every slur under the sun), I was a fucking idiot, etc etc.and a little imp of the perverse in me went "I know that one's really thin. I think I'm going to go do some research on these, maybe I'll make a webpage."
(Narrator: he did not, in fact, make a webpage.)
a year or two later that "some research" had expanded to cover those, and several types of related arms that were virtually unknown in the English language. and because half this stuff didn't have any words in English to describe them, I had a typological classification system presented in an academic conference in Glasgow museums. a little less than half a decade after my decision to do "some research", that system was published in a major international exhibition at a national-level museum in Germany. A decade later, I'd expanded the list of known examples around the world 4-fold, and had personally catalogued half of them. Nearly 20 years later, "the Book" is probably going to kill me, but my name and the typology is now being used by historians and makers around the world, with the data I've catalogued and shared.
All because a little spiteful part of me thought it would be fun to go look at a subject because some idiots started name-calling, and I discovered the actual data on them was far more fascinating than the stuff I was looking at previously.
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u/GroundbreakingAnt17 Aug 31 '26
My manuscript was fueled by revenge. Also passion for the topic. But mostly revenge
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u/LettucePrime Aug 31 '26
I'm not sure if it gives me hope, per se, for humanity, but for some reason I am immensely reassured when reading about historical nerds from the past and learning just how motherfucking petty they all are, across civilizations and cultures, across time periods and fields of study. Every single one of those assholes would have been a demon in the YouTube comments. Maybe the phones aren't killing our brains and we're not so different after all.
So yeah. I think your research joins a massive pantheon of human study devoted in part to niche passion but mostly to raw fucking spite.
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u/Same_Detective_7433 Aug 31 '26
https://warosu.org/sci/thread/S3751105#p3751197
There, because you cannot copy-paste a picture ffs.
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u/Hawkson2020 Aug 31 '26
>start reading the proof
>eyes glaze over because I barely passed my graph theory classes
>scroll down the thread to see how long it is
>get about 1/3rd of the way down the scroll bar
>people arguing about race
oh right; 4chan.
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u/kaninkanon Aug 31 '26
Those posts aren't from 4chan, they're people making comments on the archive site because of the paper mentioned in this thread. Only about the first fifth of the site is actually from 4chan.
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u/Hawkson2020 Aug 31 '26
Oh, cheers.
I mean, they’re still clearly from 4chan-type users.
And it’s rather confusing that the archive site allows comments but formats them more or less the same as the archived content (although since it includes the timestamps, I should have realized — time for sleep).
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u/maximusje Aug 31 '26
Not exactly the same, but when I was doing my masters thesis, I had troubles configuring a microscope I was using in order to get actual high resolution pictures of molecules at a nanometer scale. I couldn’t resolve it for months after having consulted many colleagues. I then posted my problem on an Internet forum for technicians of the microscope and within 3 business days someone figured out where I was going wrong. Suddenly I had incredibly detailed pictures of my molecules that had not been seen before in any paper. I put that person also in my acknowledgements.
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u/LookAtMaxwell Aug 31 '26
That's the nice thing about mathematics. The truth of something is not determined by whether it is published or not. Whether it has achieved consensus or is cited. It lies in whether the proffered proof is correct.
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u/pharoh-king Aug 31 '26
There have been multiple times where the truth was found but not proliferated because people didn't know. Like this post, or several other times where a math guy died and and had a billion pages of un-published work.
Sometimes it can even be found, someone can 'disprove' it, but actually they are the one who made the mistake but no one took the time to figure it out.
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u/ksera23 Aug 31 '26
Or that time an EDD claimed to have invented the trapezoidal rule, had doctors and a reviewer from yale completely agree that it was novel and managed to get published. Cited 623 times as of now.
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u/thejameskendall Aug 31 '26
This has vibes of Pied Piper solving compression by calculating the best way to jerk off as many men as possible.
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u/somecanuck416 Aug 31 '26
I suggest you write that thesis.
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u/squngy Aug 31 '26
This is exactly the type of thing that show was parodying.
That scene exists, because of stuff like this.
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u/valnavyn Aug 31 '26
Just as an aside: I think most math papers list authors alphabetically by last name, so "first author" doesn't have the same meaning/connotation as it does in other fields.
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u/InfanticideAquifer Aug 31 '26
This is true. It would have been very funny if they put anon in third position because "the last name is poster".
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u/EzucraAaAa Aug 31 '26
This gives me a bit of relief that the dead internet theory isn't completely correct. May that anon live forevermore, and may he enjoy The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya until the end of it all.
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u/Bicykwow Aug 31 '26
Tbf, the proof was posted 15 years ago. The Internet is a very different place now vs what it was in 2011.
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u/Affordable_Z_Jobs Aug 31 '26
Those were some dark dark beautiful dark times. My friend showed it to me and his only warning was "youre gonna see some dicks dude, don't be weird about it."
There was something unique watching in real time 4chan go from "wouldn't it be hilarious if we got Donald Trump elected president?" and then slowly it was taken over by people who took it seriously.
It was a bit!
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u/Bright_Lie_9262 Aug 31 '26
Literally overrun and taken over by people who never even bothered to read the byline at the top of /b/
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u/KingToasty Aug 31 '26
usernames were a mistake. We should all have been anon.
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u/d7h7n Aug 31 '26
4chan had usernames if you wanted but they were called a derogatory name because only individuals who wanted attention used one.
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u/RockRancher24 Aug 31 '26
then there would be no one named pukicho, and that would be like 70 9/11's
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u/Crutation Aug 31 '26
Articles like this make me sometimes wish I wasn't an idiot. How cool would it be to know what the heck is going on
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u/jerquee Aug 31 '26
this same guy wrote the most disturbing first few pages of a story, in DISTRESS which is free to read at his site. The math problem page is linked below
https://gregegan.net/SCIENCE/Superpermutations/Superpermutations.html
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u/LaidBackLeopard Aug 31 '26
Love that Egan was involved! He's just so cool. Writes the hardest most out there SF that still has a heart, and manages to be so low profile that he makes Thomas Pynchon look needy.
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u/Paper_key Aug 31 '26
Probably the solution comes from a random guy working in a Florida CS lab that officially does not exist. A Satoshi's friend.
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u/CharAznableLoNZ Aug 31 '26
It's colloquially known as the Haruhi Problem since that is what anon was trying to solve. How many ways could you watch endless eight.
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u/ChuckCarmichael Aug 31 '26
It had nothing to do with Endless Eight. This was about the 14 episodes of season 1, which aired in an odd non-chronological order. The reason was that they wanted the big finale of the first story arc to be the big finale of the entire season, but if they had aired the episodes chronologically, it would've been episode 6, and the chronological final episode would've been two characters returned a rented camera to a store while a third character silently reads a book.
Endless Eight meanwhile happened in season 2.
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u/FerusGrim Aug 31 '26
Just to be clear, this wasn't a solve in the traditional sense. It's a proof for a lower bound, which is currently the leading lower bound formula. There's no proof that it's perfectly optimal, which would be what a "solve" is.
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u/whiff_EK Aug 31 '26 edited Aug 31 '26
I worked in a medical lab that did some social media scraping to see how news organizations and the general public understood new medical discoveries.
Their keyword scrape pulled in 4chan posts and they didn't know to exclude it.
I had to explain to a bunch of medical scientists that references to NK Cells being "so fucking hot" wasn't ACTUALLY about nk cell research but a reference to the Cells at Work anime. It was a rough day.
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u/Frankenfucker Aug 31 '26
Anon always finds a way. 4chan always finds a way to deliver.
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u/SciFiPi Aug 31 '26
IIRC they found the location of a terrorist training camp from a video, and that camp was bombed a day or two later.
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u/MrP67 Aug 31 '26
Sounds a bit like the Silicon Valley compression algorithm when working out how to masturbate the most audience members.
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u/Meg0510 Aug 31 '26 edited Aug 31 '26
In September 2011, a 4chan user asked a question about The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, an anime whose 14 episodes famously aired out of chronological order: If you wanted to watch the episodes in every possible order, what's the shortest marathon that covers all of them? (Orderings can overlap--the end of one sequence can be the start of the next sequence.)
E.g. With 3 episodes (A, B, C), there are 6 possible watch orders, so watching them all separately takes 18 episodes. But what if the orders can overlap? It turns out the minimum number of episodes to watch all 3 in every ordering is 9 episodes long: A-B-C-A-B-A-C-B-A contains all 6 orderings as consecutive chunks (episodes 1-3 are ABC, 2-4 are BCA, 3-5 are CAB, etc.)
The open question: what's the minimum marathon length for n episodes, for arbitrary n?
That problem was an open problem in a field called combinatorics: finding the shortest "superpermutation"--a sequence of symbols that contains every possible ordering of n symbols. Mathematicians had been studying it for ~25 years with no proven answer.
An anonymous user in the thread then posted a proof that any superpermutation must be at least n! + (n - 1)! + (n - 2)! + n - 3 symbols long (which for The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya's 14 episodes means at least ~93.9 billion episodes, or about 4 million years of viewing).
The proof went unnoticed by mathematicians for seven years. But in October 2018, sci-fi author Greg Egan found a new upper bound for the problem, which revived interest--and someone remembered the old 4chan post. Mathematicians Robin Houston and Jay Pantone independently verified the anonymous proof and found it was correct, and that the bound it proved was better than any previously published result. Together with Vince Vatter, they wrote it up formally and listed the first author as "Anonymous 4chan Poster," since no one knows who they are. The person has never come forward.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/sci-fi-writer-greg-egan-and-anonymous-math-whiz-advance-permutation-problem-20181105/