When a fan of a cult anime series wanted to watch its episodes in every possible order, they asked a question that had perplexed combinatorial mathematicians for years

Some snippets from the article:

Math solutions can be found in surprising places, including the dark realms of the Internet. In 2011 an anonymous poster on the now infamously controversial image board 4chan posed a mathematical puzzle about the cult classic anime series The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.

The first season of this anime series consists of 14 episodes that were designed so that you can watch them in any order you like. … At some point in a 2011 discussion of the series on 4chan, someone asked the minimum number of episodes they would have to watch to have seen it in every possible order.

one of the anonymous users made an estimate of the minimum amount of all episodes to watch with an approach that was previously unknown to mathematicians

Amazing coincidence that this was just published after the recent post in this community about alternate watch orders.

    • Flagstaff@programming.devEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      I’m thinking of becoming a Haruhi fan. Does this basically mean it’s like Black Mirror or the Twilight Zone?

      • muhyb@programming.devEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        Haven’t watched either (though Black Mirror is still in my backlog) but as far as I know the Black Mirror episodes are standalone, while Haruhi has an order (there is even a chronological order) one way or another.

        I can fully recommend being a fan.

  • RedWeasel@lemmy.worldEnglish
    23·
    2 days ago

    It says in the article that i can’t be done on a computer. Probably more likely that no one has gone to the trouble of implementing said function. The hard part is how do you verify it if no one has done n=6 or 7 to compare against. The min for n=5 was 152 and max is 154 with it being 153. Not really large enough to verify against.

    • Mercuri@ani.socialEnglish
      4·
      2 days ago

      No, the function is exponential so it would very quickly reach the bounds of modern computing limitations. The best analogy I can think of is folding a sheet of paper. With each fold the thickness doubles and it quickly becomes impossible to fold more than about 7 times. Now remember that this function doesn’t just double, it grows by many magnitudes each time.

      • RedWeasel@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        I can understand that. If we had values up to 7 or 8 identified exactly it may be possible to develop an equation for beyond, though. The smaller units are just too little for that though.