Infamous Math Problem Finally Gets Solved by Fan in Anime Chatroom

Anime fans surprise all the time with the variety of fans there are, and one fan just might have used anime to help solve a tricky problem mathematicians have been trying to solve for the past 25 years.

Although the fan just used the equation to figure out the best way to watch every order of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya in the shortest time possible, now mathematicians are wondering how to progress with this solved equation from an anonymous fan.

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. //t.co/z3wVAcUJl1

— Robin Houston (@robinhouston) October 23, 2018

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is a cult classic with fans not only for its time-travelling, meta content. but for the fact that it originally aired out of order. When the series was released on home video, it was arranged in a new order and fans have been debating over which way to watch for quite some time.

Years ago, one fan posed a question for 4chan asking, "if you wanted to watch 14 episodes of the anime The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya in every possible order, what's the shortest string of episodes you'd need to watch?" One fan eventually solved the problem, and helped struggling mathematicians out by providing the best way to break down superpermutations.

A permutation relates to the order of a set of numbers (or as one way to watch Haruhi), and the "super" form of that accounts for every order. According to a report for The Verge, the anonymous equation doesn't quite solve the permutations issue but gives experts a solid platform to work off of.

Jay Pantone, mathematician at Marquette University, even worked the problem into a more professional format and the proposed equation holds up among more experts. Pantone suggests that the answer to the "Haruhi" problem is that fans would, "need to watch at least 93,884,313,611 episodes to watch the season in any possible order. At most, you'd need to watch 93,924,230,411 episodes to accomplish the task."

With the power of anime on their side, and a quite literal god in Haruhi Suzumiya, now the world of math is helped along with a solution found in the strangest of places. Mathematicians didn't expect to see a solution to their problem in an anime message board, and anime fans didn't expect that either. Goes to show just how much of a variety there is in the fandom.

via The Verge