The anonymous user posted this image to prompt a discussion on how little episodes of the 14 episode first season of Haruhi you would have to watch in order to watch them in every possible order, repeats included.
The thread eventually reached a working conclusion by divising a formula that would solve for any “n” length sequence. The thread’s findings were compiled on the mathsci wiki and titled “The Haruhi Problem.”
Last Monday (10/22/18), university mathematician Jay Pantone created a more professional looking assessment of their findings here. This lead to academia learning about 4chan’s unique findings and it’s being widely discussed.
The problem now is about credit. 4chan being an anonymous image board, there’s no one to cite for the findings.
I cannot fucking believe
I LIKE THIS
if each series watch-through were done independent from each other then it’s an easy case of n! many episodes. But if you view the complete watch-through as a consecutive sequence then you allow for permutations to be completed within sub-sequences of those strung-together watches
like if an anime had only 4 episodes, then ‘1 2 3 4’ and ‘2 1 3 4’ are both different permutations of episodes, accounting for 2 of the 4! (24) total permutations. but if you view it as having watched episodes ‘1 2 3 4 2 1 3 4’ consecutively, then you’ll notice the permutations ‘3 4 2 1’ and ‘4 2 1 3’ are internal to that sequence of 8 episodes. So youve covered 4 permutations with just 8 episode watches. so in fact n! is an UPPER bound on the number of episode watches needed to have watched the whole series in every permutation and a mathematical question arises about the Best Possible Ordering which makes maximal use of this sub-sequence phenomenon and therefore minimizes the total number of episodes you must watch.
I’m gonna read the article, and I may or may not come back with a longer rant about this. I like this
Solfege Navigator 