
An Anonymous 4chan Post Helped Solve a 25-Year-Old Math Puzzle (2018) - lostlogin
https://www.wired.com/story/how-an-anonymous-4chan-post-helped-solve-a-25-year-old-math-puzzle/
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eindiran
This is one of my favorite stories. There is some good info on the
superpermutations problem (which is now known as the Haruhi problem when
looking for the lower bound of 14) here:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superpermutation#Lower_bounds,...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superpermutation#Lower_bounds,_or_the_Haruhi_problem)

This has the original proof that appeared on /sci/:

[https://mathsci.fandom.com/wiki/The_Haruhi_Problem](https://mathsci.fandom.com/wiki/The_Haruhi_Problem)

And here is a paper authored in part by "Anonymous 4chan Poster":
[https://oeis.org/A180632/a180632.pdf](https://oeis.org/A180632/a180632.pdf)

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bdz
And here is the original thread on /sci/

[https://web.archive.org/web/20181024190314/https://warosu.or...](https://web.archive.org/web/20181024190314/https://warosu.org/sci/thread/3751105)

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gbpz
/sci/ is a weird place, but there are some extremely brilliant, bored minds
there. They published a guide:
[https://sites.google.com/site/scienceandmathguide/](https://sites.google.com/site/scienceandmathguide/)
that was great for me as an undergrad.

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lukeplato
An interesting use case of superpermutations is for password cracking on
devices that use rolling codes. I recall Samy kamkar using de bruijn's
sequence to more quickly find the unlock code for garage doors [1]. Not sure
what the difference between the de bruijn sequence [2] and superpermutations
are though.

[1] [http://samy.pl/opensesame/](http://samy.pl/opensesame/) [2]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Bruijn_sequence](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Bruijn_sequence)

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rckoepke
(2018)

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lostlogin
Sorry, yes.

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rckoepke
Oh! not an admonishment, just for others. Sometimes dang comes along and fixes
titles.

