
Futurama Writer Created And Proved A Brand New Math Theorem Just For Episode - ghurlman
http://www.geekosystem.com/futurama-prisoner-of-benda-theory/
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tptacek
While I appreciate the authentic geekiness that infused that episode, the new
season of Futurama (and indeed every Futurama production since the last season
of the original run) has lost its feel for dialog, most of the spark between
the original characters, and its sense of which gags to work into the
storyline and how. It's also become much more "blue", and in a much less
subtle way (sex was always a subtext of its humor, but was usually handled far
more gracefully --- like in the episode where Fry drinks the emperor).

I've been very disappointed by the new season. The only episode I found to be
watchable was the one with the time machine.

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gecko
While I think this season's not as good as seasons previous, I also think
you're being too harsh--and I think the quality of writing is getting better.

 _The Late Philip J. Fry_ (the time machine one), as you admitted, was
hilarious. They worked in references to piles of classic science fiction
movies; the show covered time travel, theories of the nature of time and the
universe, paradoxes, and predestination; and the writing was tight and funny.
So we seem to agree that one was solid.

 _A Clockwork Origin_ , two episodes later, pulled together the panspermia
hypothesis, the debate between intelligent design and evolution, the
singularity, and clear send-ups to _Second Variety_ and _Planet of the Apes_.

 _Proposition Infinity_ was more a political than a science fiction episode
(and we had those in the earlier seasons, too--the garbage sphere, the women's
planet, etc.), but I thought did a hilarious send-up of Proposition 8,
religious responses to homosexuality, San Francisco gay pride parades, and so
on.

And while I agree that episodes from this season are in general more vulgar
than average from previous Futurama seasons, I also think you're viewing those
seasons through rose-colored glasses. The sex in this episode was no more
explicit than Fry and Leela in _Tales of Interest_ , Professor Farnsworth's
seduction of Mom in _Mother's Day_ , or half a dozen other episodes, and while
I thought the third episode of the season ( _Attack of the Killer App_ ) was
disgusting, I don't honestly think it was _more_ disgusting than _Fry and the
Slurm Factory_ , where it's revealed that Slurm is slug poop.

Futurama's always mixed highbrow with lowbrow. I agree they've gotten
raunchier, and I think it hurts the humor. But I think writing the whole
season off as a loss is extremely unfair.

~~~
tiles
I feel as though some of the episodes are bizarrely topical, like references
to the app store, _The Da Vinci Code_... all things which would have been
topical even a few years ago, when the show was cancelled. My theory is they
are lingering, filler ideas they had to get out of the way in order to air
brilliant pieces of work like _A Clockwork Origin_ and _The Late Philip J.
Fry_.

~~~
sliverstorm
Not necessarily filler. Just put in the queue and never removed?

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SandB0x
I've LaTeX-ed the screenshot for your perusal: <http://imgur.com/HlcWm.png>

(Probably some typos. Feel free to fix: <http://pastebin.ca/1922336>)

~~~
studer
So can someone with more math knowledge comment on how "Brand New" this
theorem is? Comparing the Geekosystem post with the tone of the original APS
article, it sure feels like a certain amount of breathless hyperbole was added
to the former...

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dmvaldman
The article isn't very accurate. In the episode, two people can swap minds,
but the same two minds cannot be swapped twice. The article says that "after
enough swaps everyone can find their original body." But this is incorrect.
The actual math problem solved says that by adding two people to the pool (the
harlem globetrotters in the episode) you can then always find a way for
everyone to swap into their original bodies.

The math proof shows this by starting with an arbitrary permutation of minds
(pi) for n people, then adds two new people x and y to show that there now
exists another permutation of minds (sigma) that "undoes" the original
permutation. This means there's a way for everyone to get their bodies back.

Without the addition of two people x and y there is no such guarantee.

To understand the details you'll need to know about group theory. Specifically
permutations. This isn't a "deep" problem. But it is awesome that it's correct
and on TV!

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zck
>To understand the details you'll need to know about group theory.

I wrote up an algorithm to swap the minds back, and then proved its
correctness, and its running time. It might be more understandable than the
group theory proof. It's in a comment thread on reddit:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/d3ar3/tonights_futuram...](http://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/d3ar3/tonights_futurama_episode_featured_the_reordering/c0x91ht)

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ramine
Talk about derivative work!

~~~
jacoblyles
Actually group theory is discrete and algebraic.

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dododo
i'm not sure what you mean by discrete.

SO(3) (the group of rotations) is not discrete in any sense i can think of.

some groups have a discrete topology, but not all by any means... are you
referring to cayley's theorem?

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jacoblyles
Discrete as in you'll never take a derivative of anything, so the parent pun
comment is meaningless. At least in the subset of group theory I studied, no
continuous functions were used which are the only objects that derivatives are
defined on.

In other news, (bad) pun threads have come to hacker news. I guess it was
always a matter of time.

~~~
ethaneade
It so happens that SO(3), being a Lie group, has a well-defined space of
derivatives: its associated Lie algebra so(3) [notice lower case]. In fact,
the generators of the group fundamentally arise from the derivatives of
rotations around the identity.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie_group#The_Lie_algebra_assoc...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie_group#The_Lie_algebra_associated_to_a_Lie_group)

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cschneid
This has been the worst pun-thread ever.

