Loath as I am to give 4chan credit for anything positive, I feel like the article subject is slightly dismissive with its use of the phrase "stumbled upon." The anonymous 4chan user clearly did the work, it's not as though they came upon a proof written in the sand. For all we know it was a grad student with an ABD in Statistics who just happened to like anime.
But the phrasing almost implies it's not a true accomplishment because "scientists" didn't discover it.
4chan has a large cesspit, but it gathers a lot of intelligent people who can ignore the noise. For any interest, there’s someone somewhere who made a half decent thread on the topic. There’s decent barriers too (as in the less talked about boards are more thoroughly moderated than the ones that make the news, much like Reddit)
i took it to mean that they stumbled upon it in the sense that they didn't try to make a novel contribution to the field of mathematics or think they were doing that, but just solving a specific problem
I suppose in my head, when the phrase "stumbled upon" is used, it would imply that someone was solving a problem that they weren't intending to solve, or via a method that they weren't intending. A hypothetical headline might be "Food scientist stumbles upon cure for cancer while refining process for fish oil": the scientist wasn't trying to solve the problem of cancer, they were trying to solve the problem of extending fish oil shelf-life, and incidentally found the former.
But you would find it strange if the article said, "Oncologist stumbles upon cure for cancer while testing new colon cancer treatment." Because in that case, the scientist is seemingly doing what he set out to do--it was not unintentional.
It seems like the 4chan poster knew enough about mathematics to recognize the stated problem as a mathematical problem and write a proof for it. That already demonstrates a degree of specialty and intention that makes "stumble upon" seem dismissive, to me. The fact that they didn't know they were solving a a more general, already-known problem is irrelevant, IMO. It would almost be like denying them credit because they didn't fill out the paperwork correctly.
> But you would find it strange if the article said, "Oncologist stumbles upon cure for cancer while testing new colon cancer treatment." Because in that case, the scientist is seemingly doing what he set out to do--it was not unintentional.
I wouldn't really find that strange. Finding a cure for cancer is not an expected outcome of testing a cancer treatment and certainly isn't what the oncologist is trying to do. It's directly related to what you were trying to do, and better, but it's still a lucky find that you weren't looking for.
I have, for a long time, dismissed Scientific American as a pointless work of marketing. This article, on the other hand, makes me think I may be missing some things. The problem is stated in an interesting way that might be broadly understood and enjoyed. It gives some results that are explained well and easily understood. It also leaves some open questions that can be explored, letting the explorer dream about settling some famous open problem. The perfect sort of thing for high school math (and an old guy killing some time).
Thank you Manon Bischoff (author), Daisy Yuhas (editor), and Scientific American for giving me this to think about.
I've never really done it at any advanced level, but I think good "science communication for the masses" is just a really hard problem. I say that because it seems like there's an overwhelming amount of really bad science communication out there.
You have creators like Veratasium on YouTube, who I think do really great jobs making a lot of science and mathematical topics interesting to nearly everyone, but there's also a lot of articles that are either very boring, incorrect, overpromising, or some combination of the three.
My main issue is when the author assumes the reader knows much more about a topic and just glosses over salient details on that assumption. It's not necessarily intentional by the author, and is more of an editorial problem. When you're speaking with someone or a group, you can see the looks on people's faces if you're losing them, or they interrupt asking for more details. In a written piece, that is not possible and a target base level needs to be set with details for that level to follow along. It's up to the editor to go back to the author for that information if things are being glossed over.
It's a fine art; if you were to go into detail about every single thing mentioned by your article, your article would be hundreds of pages long and probably a pretty boring and dry read, but if you don't go into enough detail you risk it being difficult for most of the population.
I agree it's up to the editor to figure out where to draw that line, and a lot of them aren't terribly good at that.
> I think good "science communication for the masses" is just a really hard problem.
Not only is it hard, but there are tons of examples of hoaxes that spread like wildfire. The latest I can remember were the room-temperature superconductor papers.
Yeah, I'm still disappointed by that one. I was super excited by the LK99 stuff; I don't know if that was a "hoax", but it was definitely bad science that took the media by storm.
I think that the problem is that there's effectively an infinite amount of science and it changes and updates all the time, so it's impossible to be truly "caught up" with everything, and most studies are already in pretty specific niche subjects that require a lot of understanding on that niche subject. Most people doing science communication can't possibly learn it all, and most certainly aren't equipped to call out fraud of bad science in a paper, so they have to take the papers at their word.
I mean, before I dropped my PhD, I was studying formal methods in computer science. I got reasonably good with state machine models in Isabelle, so you'd think I'd be competent with "formal methods" as a concept, but not really. If I were try and read a paper on, I don't know, "Cubic Type Theory with Agda", I would have to do a lot of catching up, almost starting from scratch, and I think I'm probably better equipped than the average software engineer for that. Even if I got to a state of more-or-less understanding it, I would certainly not be equipped to call out bad science or math or fraud or anything like that.
I used to be a subscriber for years a long time ago. I’m not sure where you got this opinion unless you are basing things on recent years. There was always something interesting in them.
Sometimes magazines change management/ownership/other. On the outside they look similar but they lose that 'something' that made them interesting to read. For example For me this happened with both Dr. Dobbs and MSJ (renamed to MSDN). Both had large management changes and became very quickly something else. Not nearly as engaging or interesting. I realized I had not looked at either in a year. Skimmed them for anything I wanted to read and found nothing. I dropped the sub.
I used to enjoy the magazine and am basing my negative opinion (expressed above) on reading experience on more recent readings. I used to enjoy the amateur scientist and mathematical recreation the most. Then those sections disappeared. I have not been reading it recently so maybe things have changed some.
I am not surprised that the author of this great article is Manon Bischoff. I have been reading her articles on Spektrum.de for years now, and they are always excellent. Here is a list of all her articles: https://www.spektrum.de/profil/bischoff/manon/1486871
There's something unbelievably funny to me that actual mathematical papers have to cite a 4chan post.
It does make me wonder how much hidden knowledge is hidden in parts of the internet; maybe this is the only genius mathematical thing we've found on 4chan...
> It does make me wonder how much hidden knowledge is hidden in parts of the internet
That was the shining hope of the internet. "Information wants to be free" and now it could be available to anyone with a modem vs just in university or municipal libraries. Now, we have megasites that dominate the web's attention with very trivial and banal content that makes looking for that information nearly impossible.
Well, it's not as if that promise didn't come true. We do have the world's knowledge at our fingertips. It's more of a curation problem, and a natural result of a decentralized web. Wikipedia could be considered a "megasite", but I'd argue it's more valuable than a million independent sites.
Who knows what kind of weird mathematical or scientific things have been discovered by hobbyists and posted on some obscure forum thread or abandoned blog that wasn't appreciated by anyone?
Like, if someone had a proof for the Goldbach Conjecture, and for whatever reason posted about it on the WatchUSeek forums (just as a throwaway example), it could just lay dormant for who knows how long? The audience on WatchUSeek might not realize the significance of a such a discovery, and maybe not even the poster, so it doesn't get any recognition and just never gets picked up.
I mean, going with the example in the original post, I don't know much about Superpermutations (only a little after this post went viral), so if I had seen this 4chan post in the wild, I would just assume it's some guy doing a bit of math that I wasn't familiar with. I wouldn't be able to spot that this was actually a contribution to anything.
If you were to ask an LLM trained on just scientific data to solve this problem, it would either solve it really quickly because it has seemingly irrelevant 4chan data or it would not solve it at all. It's a argument against non-general LLMs, and very low-key shout out to liberal arts degrees.
Citations are supposed to be able to be looked up, and 4chan threads are designed to disappear. This only still exists because someone realized it was important (or, more likely, amusing that someone succeeded) and saved it elsewhere.
Lots of boards, including /sci/ (the board in question) have automatic permanent archives. The archive of this thread is linked in the mathsci.wikia.com page ( https://warosu.org/sci/thread/S3751105#p3751197 )
> Why it would be something extra ordinary? You give screenshot, date... Journalists do it all the time: "evil X are attacking Y while doing Z".
It's just funny. I usually associate 4chan as primarily shitposting. Memes and offensive-stuff-for-the-sake-of-being-offensive and porn. You don't generally see mathematical work being done on there.
CNN might have some shitposting, but I don't think it's "known" for shitposting. I think most people consider it a "news" organization, though I'm sure how "good" of a news organization it is depends largely on your politics.
Oddly, the image that Scientific American chose to illustrate their article isn't from any of the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya projects, but from Aokana - Four Rhythms Across the Blue, a much more obscure title.
Maybe. Writing a publication is a lot more work than a post on 4chan, even if it's a good post.
If it's not your field you might well not bother to write the paper. (After all, it's not your field, somebody might have solved it since it didn't seem that hard, and do you really want to do an exhaustive literature research for a fun puzzle you worked out?)
At one of my old jobs, the bathroom was locked with a 4 digit code followed by the key symbol.
We jokingly made up "Bathroom Code" as an interview question/to nerd snipe each other instead of working, which was "assuming you don't have to press key, and that the bathroom door will unlock if the correct 4 digits are entered in order at any time, write the code to print the shortest possible test sequence to guarantee you entry". Obviously we didn't give this to any candidates but it's amusing to think that the problem is a lot more interesting than we gave it credit for.
This is always how it works. Large fan bases are filled with extremely capable people with vastly different specialties so I have no doubt this 4chan user had a very strong math background and just couldn't resist solving it for real.
Loath as I am to give 4chan credit for anything positive, I feel like the article subject is slightly dismissive with its use of the phrase "stumbled upon." The anonymous 4chan user clearly did the work, it's not as though they came upon a proof written in the sand. For all we know it was a grad student with an ABD in Statistics who just happened to like anime.
But the phrasing almost implies it's not a true accomplishment because "scientists" didn't discover it.
4chan has a large cesspit, but it gathers a lot of intelligent people who can ignore the noise. For any interest, there’s someone somewhere who made a half decent thread on the topic. There’s decent barriers too (as in the less talked about boards are more thoroughly moderated than the ones that make the news, much like Reddit)
Most popular websites gather a lot of intelligent people. Nothing specific to 4chan.
Shhh!!! Don't tell them that 4chan is the best origami/paper craft website on the internet!
i took it to mean that they stumbled upon it in the sense that they didn't try to make a novel contribution to the field of mathematics or think they were doing that, but just solving a specific problem
I suppose in my head, when the phrase "stumbled upon" is used, it would imply that someone was solving a problem that they weren't intending to solve, or via a method that they weren't intending. A hypothetical headline might be "Food scientist stumbles upon cure for cancer while refining process for fish oil": the scientist wasn't trying to solve the problem of cancer, they were trying to solve the problem of extending fish oil shelf-life, and incidentally found the former.
But you would find it strange if the article said, "Oncologist stumbles upon cure for cancer while testing new colon cancer treatment." Because in that case, the scientist is seemingly doing what he set out to do--it was not unintentional.
It seems like the 4chan poster knew enough about mathematics to recognize the stated problem as a mathematical problem and write a proof for it. That already demonstrates a degree of specialty and intention that makes "stumble upon" seem dismissive, to me. The fact that they didn't know they were solving a a more general, already-known problem is irrelevant, IMO. It would almost be like denying them credit because they didn't fill out the paperwork correctly.
"Stumbled upon" is used for mathematicians discovering something by working it out all the time.
> But you would find it strange if the article said, "Oncologist stumbles upon cure for cancer while testing new colon cancer treatment." Because in that case, the scientist is seemingly doing what he set out to do--it was not unintentional.
I wouldn't really find that strange. Finding a cure for cancer is not an expected outcome of testing a cancer treatment and certainly isn't what the oncologist is trying to do. It's directly related to what you were trying to do, and better, but it's still a lucky find that you weren't looking for.
> Loath as I am to give 4chan credit for anything positive
Why, whats wrong with 4chan? Outside of /pol/ and /b/ its just an image board with many different users.
I have, for a long time, dismissed Scientific American as a pointless work of marketing. This article, on the other hand, makes me think I may be missing some things. The problem is stated in an interesting way that might be broadly understood and enjoyed. It gives some results that are explained well and easily understood. It also leaves some open questions that can be explored, letting the explorer dream about settling some famous open problem. The perfect sort of thing for high school math (and an old guy killing some time).
Thank you Manon Bischoff (author), Daisy Yuhas (editor), and Scientific American for giving me this to think about.
I've never really done it at any advanced level, but I think good "science communication for the masses" is just a really hard problem. I say that because it seems like there's an overwhelming amount of really bad science communication out there.
You have creators like Veratasium on YouTube, who I think do really great jobs making a lot of science and mathematical topics interesting to nearly everyone, but there's also a lot of articles that are either very boring, incorrect, overpromising, or some combination of the three.
My main issue is when the author assumes the reader knows much more about a topic and just glosses over salient details on that assumption. It's not necessarily intentional by the author, and is more of an editorial problem. When you're speaking with someone or a group, you can see the looks on people's faces if you're losing them, or they interrupt asking for more details. In a written piece, that is not possible and a target base level needs to be set with details for that level to follow along. It's up to the editor to go back to the author for that information if things are being glossed over.
It's a fine art; if you were to go into detail about every single thing mentioned by your article, your article would be hundreds of pages long and probably a pretty boring and dry read, but if you don't go into enough detail you risk it being difficult for most of the population.
I agree it's up to the editor to figure out where to draw that line, and a lot of them aren't terribly good at that.
https://xkcd.com/2501/
> I think good "science communication for the masses" is just a really hard problem.
Not only is it hard, but there are tons of examples of hoaxes that spread like wildfire. The latest I can remember were the room-temperature superconductor papers.
Yeah, I'm still disappointed by that one. I was super excited by the LK99 stuff; I don't know if that was a "hoax", but it was definitely bad science that took the media by storm.
I think that the problem is that there's effectively an infinite amount of science and it changes and updates all the time, so it's impossible to be truly "caught up" with everything, and most studies are already in pretty specific niche subjects that require a lot of understanding on that niche subject. Most people doing science communication can't possibly learn it all, and most certainly aren't equipped to call out fraud of bad science in a paper, so they have to take the papers at their word.
I mean, before I dropped my PhD, I was studying formal methods in computer science. I got reasonably good with state machine models in Isabelle, so you'd think I'd be competent with "formal methods" as a concept, but not really. If I were try and read a paper on, I don't know, "Cubic Type Theory with Agda", I would have to do a lot of catching up, almost starting from scratch, and I think I'm probably better equipped than the average software engineer for that. Even if I got to a state of more-or-less understanding it, I would certainly not be equipped to call out bad science or math or fraud or anything like that.
I used to be a subscriber for years a long time ago. I’m not sure where you got this opinion unless you are basing things on recent years. There was always something interesting in them.
Sometimes magazines change management/ownership/other. On the outside they look similar but they lose that 'something' that made them interesting to read. For example For me this happened with both Dr. Dobbs and MSJ (renamed to MSDN). Both had large management changes and became very quickly something else. Not nearly as engaging or interesting. I realized I had not looked at either in a year. Skimmed them for anything I wanted to read and found nothing. I dropped the sub.
I used to enjoy the magazine and am basing my negative opinion (expressed above) on reading experience on more recent readings. I used to enjoy the amateur scientist and mathematical recreation the most. Then those sections disappeared. I have not been reading it recently so maybe things have changed some.
It's kind of the default opinion in academia. Same goes for most popsci stuff I guess.
I am not surprised that the author of this great article is Manon Bischoff. I have been reading her articles on Spektrum.de for years now, and they are always excellent. Here is a list of all her articles: https://www.spektrum.de/profil/bischoff/manon/1486871
Selected articles get translated and published by SciAm: https://www.scientificamerican.com/author/manon-bischoff/
Previous discussions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18292061
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23968618
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39325146
See also:
https://mathsci.fandom.com/wiki/The_Haruhi_Problem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superpermutation#Lower_bounds,...
The image in the upper-right of the Fandom link was how it was posted in the 4chan thread, little disappointing it's left out of most posts about it.
The character is actually from Steins;Gate, not The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya: https://steins-gate.fandom.com/wiki/Kurisu_Makise
Kurisu in front of a whiteboard with "You should be able to solve this" is a fairly famous post format.
https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=%22You%20should%20be%2...
2011 in the title would have been nice. Of course it's the Haruhi problem.
There's something unbelievably funny to me that actual mathematical papers have to cite a 4chan post.
It does make me wonder how much hidden knowledge is hidden in parts of the internet; maybe this is the only genius mathematical thing we've found on 4chan...
> It does make me wonder how much hidden knowledge is hidden in parts of the internet
That was the shining hope of the internet. "Information wants to be free" and now it could be available to anyone with a modem vs just in university or municipal libraries. Now, we have megasites that dominate the web's attention with very trivial and banal content that makes looking for that information nearly impossible.
Well, it's not as if that promise didn't come true. We do have the world's knowledge at our fingertips. It's more of a curation problem, and a natural result of a decentralized web. Wikipedia could be considered a "megasite", but I'd argue it's more valuable than a million independent sites.
Yeah that's kind of what I was getting at.
Who knows what kind of weird mathematical or scientific things have been discovered by hobbyists and posted on some obscure forum thread or abandoned blog that wasn't appreciated by anyone?
Like, if someone had a proof for the Goldbach Conjecture, and for whatever reason posted about it on the WatchUSeek forums (just as a throwaway example), it could just lay dormant for who knows how long? The audience on WatchUSeek might not realize the significance of a such a discovery, and maybe not even the poster, so it doesn't get any recognition and just never gets picked up.
I mean, going with the example in the original post, I don't know much about Superpermutations (only a little after this post went viral), so if I had seen this 4chan post in the wild, I would just assume it's some guy doing a bit of math that I wasn't familiar with. I wouldn't be able to spot that this was actually a contribution to anything.
Not only cite, but listed as the first author!
https://oeis.org/A180632/a180632.pdf
If you were to ask an LLM trained on just scientific data to solve this problem, it would either solve it really quickly because it has seemingly irrelevant 4chan data or it would not solve it at all. It's a argument against non-general LLMs, and very low-key shout out to liberal arts degrees.
you mean unbelievably based
ＴＯ ＢＥ ＯＲ ＮＯＴ ＴＯ ＢＥ ＴＨＡＴ ＩＳ ＴＨＥ ＧＧＧＺＯＲＮＯＮＰＬＡＴＴ
Zalgo, your parole is still in effect.
Why it would be something extra ordinary? You give screenshot, date... Journalists do it all the time: "evil X are attacking Y while doing Z".
Try to quote laptop from hell in your papers. Everyone knows it exist, but it only had pictures of some random guy smoking. Nothing else!!!
Citations are supposed to be able to be looked up, and 4chan threads are designed to disappear. This only still exists because someone realized it was important (or, more likely, amusing that someone succeeded) and saved it elsewhere.
Lots of boards, including /sci/ (the board in question) have automatic permanent archives. The archive of this thread is linked in the mathsci.wikia.com page ( https://warosu.org/sci/thread/S3751105#p3751197 )
> Why it would be something extra ordinary? You give screenshot, date... Journalists do it all the time: "evil X are attacking Y while doing Z".
It's just funny. I usually associate 4chan as primarily shitposting. Memes and offensive-stuff-for-the-sake-of-being-offensive and porn. You don't generally see mathematical work being done on there.
I used 4chan for cooking and dietary stuff. It was a huge site, something like reddit.
Math stuff was very strong there, I think you just never visited this site!
I have visited the site, but mostly just hung around in /b/. I didn't really check out any of the other forums on there.
I could be wrong, but I think that the average non-active-4chan-user associates 4chan primarily with /b/.
CNN is known for shit posting, but most of their content is good!
CNN might have some shitposting, but I don't think it's "known" for shitposting. I think most people consider it a "news" organization, though I'm sure how "good" of a news organization it is depends largely on your politics.
Visited 4chan twice about 5 years apart, saw CSAM both times. I have an absolute hatred of the place rightly or wrongly.
I saw CSAM on their once like seventeen years ago, reported it, and it was removed pretty quickly. I've been fortunate enough to not see it again.
apparently only /b /pol and maybe 1 or 2 others are bananas. the rest is well moderated and civil.
Oddly, the image that Scientific American chose to illustrate their article isn't from any of the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya projects, but from Aokana - Four Rhythms Across the Blue, a much more obscure title.
It could have been a mathematician , you never know with that Anon guy.
If they were mathematicians, they would have published it, no?
Maybe. Writing a publication is a lot more work than a post on 4chan, even if it's a good post.
If it's not your field you might well not bother to write the paper. (After all, it's not your field, somebody might have solved it since it didn't seem that hard, and do you really want to do an exhaustive literature research for a fun puzzle you worked out?)
At one of my old jobs, the bathroom was locked with a 4 digit code followed by the key symbol. We jokingly made up "Bathroom Code" as an interview question/to nerd snipe each other instead of working, which was "assuming you don't have to press key, and that the bathroom door will unlock if the correct 4 digits are entered in order at any time, write the code to print the shortest possible test sequence to guarantee you entry". Obviously we didn't give this to any candidates but it's amusing to think that the problem is a lot more interesting than we gave it credit for.
If the code is allowed repeats then the problem is much easier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Bruijn_sequence.
This is always how it works. Large fan bases are filled with extremely capable people with vastly different specialties so I have no doubt this 4chan user had a very strong math background and just couldn't resist solving it for real.
Should not the de Bruijn sequence work somehow for this problem?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Bruijn_sequence
That would give you some string that contains all the permutations, but definitely not the shortest such string.
Woah, Haruhi is now considered classic.
Calling Haruhi classic isn't that bad - I've seen people on this site referring to 2010s-era hardware as "retro".
The anime will be 19 years old next month, so it's probably not wrong to consider it such.
It reinforces that I'm getting old, though.
Non-paywall link: https://archive.is/i140b
@gwern was it you?
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