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Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved an interesting problem
- montenegrohugo 8y agoThis is fantastic. Imagine having to cite "Anonymous user on 4chan" on your paper. I'd probably just do it for the novelty (who else can say they have a more unusual source??)
- z_open 8y agoEthically do you even have to cite something properly when the person who solved it was intentionally anonymous? If the concern is that people will think the person writing solved it, they can just write a sentence where it came from.
- ceejayoz 8y ago> Ethically do you even have to cite something properly when the person who solved it was intentionally anonymous? Yes. Not because they need/want the credit, but because it's important to note that it's not your idea. > If the concern is that people will think the person writing solved it, they can just write a sentence where it came from. That is, basically, what a citation is.
- k__ 8y agoWho can proof that it isn't your idea?
- GiuseppaAcciaio 8y agoNot to mention that a citation is there not only to show the world whose content you are referencing, but also because in case the reader doesn't believe you and wants to go check, they can do so by following the citation
- dzdt 8y agoAcademia has no problem with pseudonymous publication. See "Student" of "Student's T distribution" fame. [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sealy_Gosset https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sealy_Gosset
- avinassh 8y ago> Academia has no problem with pseudonymous publication another great example is Bitcoin paper.
- hkmurakami 8y agoI guess we cite the poster's hash and timestamp?
- rtkwe 8y agoYou'd need a link for people to see the original content too so you'd want to include a link to one of the archive sites I guess (as a second best source for an ephemeral post). It's odd but there are citation patterns for websites, wonder if they include a standard for including archives of sources not available at time of writing.
- huntie 8y agoWhat do you mean by hash? 4chan posts use an incrementing id per board, so if you put >>>/sci/3751197 you have a unique identifier for the post (sci being the board and 3751197 being the post number). For convenience you could link to an archive site as well, but they're known to die every few years.
- gfosco 8y agoSome boards like /pol/ have a user hash, unique per user-session, stable across posts.
- huntie 8y agoAh I forgot about that. It would certainly be a good idea to include it if available. Do you know if it is necessary for a unique id? I've never browsed any of the boards with user hashes.
- gfosco 8y agoNot sure what you mean by necessary. Post id would still be unique.
- claudiawerner 8y agoThe hashes assigned to your IP on the boards that have them are per-thread to my knowledge. All your posts in one thread will have a particular hash, but your post in another thread will have a different one.
- fs111 8y agociting "anonymous", if it is unclear who the author is, is nothing new. I did that a long time ago when I a cited something from the nmap man page in a paper for university . Back then it was unclear - at least to me - who the author is. This is a very common practice. I do not see, where the novelty is.
- RowBoat6123 8y agoBill Thurston cited personal communication with himself, which is a pretty unusual source.
- mietek 8y agoInevitably, I’m going to have to ask for a reference.
- chrislipa 8y agoHe used to sit on the floor of his office with the lights off under a giant moving box and brainstorm math. Reference: personal communication
- RowBoat6123 8y agoAmusingly enough, it's personal communication with one of his students.
- anticensor 8y agoI will reject a paper if it references a private communication with author oneself. Just tell the truth, undisclosed prior work.
- RowBoat6123 8y agoI believe it was his thesis and I assume it was tongue in cheek.
- lemoncucumber 8y agoThis tweet is misleadingly worded. The solution was not posted on 4chan, but rather by an anonymous user on a “wiki mainly devoted to anime” as the original tweet quoted by this tweet makes clear.
- rofo1 8y agoIt was indeed posted on 4chan, as you can see here - http://4watch.org/superstring/ http://4watch.org/superstring/ That's the whole thread
- ma2rten 8y agoThe follow-up to the other tweet says it was copied to that wiki from 4chan.
- acali 8y agochange "wiki" to "message-board" and "mainly" to "originally" and it becomes accurate. It came from the /sci/ board on 4chan.
- rtkwe 8y agoThe original tweet is somewhat confused though too because the linked wiki is an archive/summary of a thread on /sci/ which is one of the 4chan message boards. It's copied there because of the ephemeral nature of posts on the actual boards so you can't provide a permanent link, thus linking to the next best source seems the best choice.
- lemoncucumber 8y agoThat makes more sense, thanks for the clarification. The tweet saying that it was originally posted on a "wiki" and then linking to a wiki made me think that that wiki was the actual source.
- CPLX 8y agoAlso lending strong support for the infinite number of monkeys theorem.
- huntie 8y agoNot at all, 4chan has* quite a few very smart people who for various reasons might not have "made it" in life. This type of thing used to be called "weaponized autism" or "autism" on site. This usage of autism really means something closer to "extreme obsession". * or at least had. I think that a lot of people left the site over the last few years as the site changed quite dramatically.
- volkisch 8y agoUnder the anonymous veil is hard to know if some poster is an accomplished person IRL. For all we know one of the anons that contributed to this problem is a Fields medalist whom is also a closeted weeb.
- huntie 8y agoThat's true, and in this specific case it seems hard to tell. I guess my idea of the average 4chan user of old is a college dropout shutin. That might be because when I started browsing being a shutin/NEET was the "cool" thing. I think this quote sums it up nicely: "In my online persona I pretend that I am ironically pretending to be a NEET living in my parents’ basement, but I am one in actual fact."
- throwaway27940 8y agoPretty much all my sort-of-nerd friends and I left the site some time between 2012 and 2015. I think it all went downhill when Obama got his second term and the 'libertarians' became dislodged by full-blown Nazis. There used to be quite a few prominent academics on /sci/'s early days.
- huntie 8y agoMaybe? I've always attributed the fall to a combination of the fappening, Moot's departure, and the 2016 elections. The huge influx of new users combined with a change in moderation absolutely destroyed the site. My memory isn't so good, but I don't think there was much political content outside of /pol/ and /b/ until 2015 or so. Might be dependent on what boards you browsed though. I think you're right about Nazis coming in, but I think that it was much more contained when Moot was there. I guess maybe that provided the setup for the 2016 elections.
- mpiedrav 8y agoAn "academically correct" solution (i.e., not to taint the prestige of a scholar who cites the solution) would be to cite a real, proxy scholar who checks the solution, but gives all credit to the anonymous 4chan user. Scientists often abhor citing from blogs, forums, and Wikipedia, as those publications "are not peer-reviewed by trustworthy professionals".
- PopeDotNinja 8y agoThey are also prone to disappearing, post-citation editing, etc.
- Bartweiss 8y agoDefinitely true, and worth responding to. (For instance, with a specific Internet Archive source or a link to the Wikipedia version history instead of main page.) But it's also uncomfortably true that academic works have an ugly tendency to disappear post-citation. Less so in mathematics, I'm sure, but even in the hard sciences far too many papers out there reference things that weren't digitized, rely on data that wasn't published with the paper, or otherwise hinge on something you can't actually get to. There's probably no great answer here, it just feels like authors and editors sometimes use "it was reputably published once" to shrug off disappearing sources.
- mkirklions 8y ago>Scientists often abhor citing from blogs, forums, and Wikipedia, as those publications "are not peer-reviewed by trustworthy professionals". Academia. And even that is error prone due to bias.
- simonbyrne 8y agoThere is precedent for this solution: https://academic.oup.com/biomet/article-abstract/76/1/183/225021?redirectedFrom=PDF https://academic.oup.com/biomet/article-abstract/76/1/183/22...
- rtkwe 8y agoThe person writing that review is going to need to cite it somehow though so the question of how best to cite an ephemeral anonymous post that's only available through archives or secondary summaries (like the linked wiki) still stands.
- pjc50 8y agoA surprising amount of effort goes into maintaining uniform citation formats for papers. Bibtex is one of the various tools built to manage them. They're effectively the original hyperlinks, on paper.
- flatline 8y agoIsn’t this result in every introductory combinatorics textbook?
- flyingfences 8y agoYou're misunderstanding the problem. It's not a question of the number of permutations. It's a question of the total number of episodes that must be watched to have seen all possible permutations.
- Izkata 8y agoNot sure why you're grey; you are correct about why it's not introductory. Overlap between permutations is why it's not as simple as it first sounds. For example, to borrow the wiki example, "121" includes both "12" and "21" permutations.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- btrettel 8y agoI would cite the wiki with a note in the citation that the wiki was a copy of the 4chan thread. And I'd put a copy on an web archive service. WebCite was mentioned in the Twitter thread: http://www.webcitation.org/ http://www.webcitation.org/ If this isn't credible enough for most academics, then I think they have their priorities wrong. I want to cite the best work, not just work that looks good superficially. I assume that the claim that this is the best known lower bound is true. In that case, if I am writing a relevant paper, it's my duty to cite the result regardless of where it came from as far as I am concerned. Edit: Same sentiment in this post a few minutes before mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18292438 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18292438
- golergka 8y agoWell, as long as people quote Broom Bridge for quaternion multiplication, I don't see any reason why they couldn't quote 4chan as well.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ASipos 8y agoCome on, this is a myth. I work in math and it is not at all unusual to cite informal sources. Also, someone should inform Greg Egan: http://www.gregegan.net/SCIENCE/Superpermutations/Superpermutations.html http://www.gregegan.net/SCIENCE/Superpermutations/Superpermu...
- empath75 8y agoIf you click through the links, he's in the google groups thread talking about it.
- ASipos 8y agoThanks! For those interested, the link is https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/superpermutators/j5y24bOemiM https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/superpermutators/j...
- jessriedel 8y agoYea, this is also something that is not unique to the internet age. Academics have been (imperfectly) assigning credit to informal contributions since there have been citations (and before!). Footnotes like "I thank B. Johnson for this argument" have always been used.
- JdeBP 8y agoItself discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18271265 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18271265 .
- pfortuny 8y agoTotal non-issue: “The following proof was found in the 4chan web site (URL at the end), without any attribution...”
- ortusdux 8y agoThe Haruhi problem reminds me of De Bruijn sequences, aka why I don't trust 5 button keyless car entry systems. Fords keypads do not have return keys, delays, or attempt limits. A 3125 button sequence can guarantee you will unlock the door. It would take about 10-20 minutes for someone who has practiced to break in. Someone this year made a bot that did it in about 5 minutes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Bruijn_sequence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Bruijn_sequence https://hackaday.com/2018/06/18/opening-a-ford-with-a-robot-and-the-de-bruijn-sequence/ https://hackaday.com/2018/06/18/opening-a-ford-with-a-robot-...
- latchkey 8y ago"de Bruijin sequence is a similar problem, but this problem has the additional constraint of being non-cyclical." [1] [1] http://mathsci.wikia.com/wiki/Talk:The_Haruhi_Problem/@comment-36964662-20181024143823/@comment-101.164.81.64-20181024145520?permalink=2075#comm-2075 http://mathsci.wikia.com/wiki/Talk:The_Haruhi_Problem/@comme...
- krackers 8y agoAdditionally de bruijin sequences are about generating all possible n-length strings from a fixed k-character set (where you can repeat characters). In this problem we only want to generate k-length permutations of a k-character set.
- strictnein 8y agoYou're worried about someone standing next to your car for 10-20 minutes pushing buttons and not messing up a 3125 number combo on a keypad with almost no tactile feedback?
- tspike 8y agoSurely a rock or other heavy blunt object would be more effective.
- codys 8y agoThe comment you're replying to contains: > Someone this year made a bot that did it in about 5 minutes. It's also the case that it's plausible one can interrupt & resume the sequence (at the cost of 4 extra button presses per interruption).
- firdak 8y agoLooking at this from the other side, if a non-mathematician "solves an interesting problem", is there a recommended way to make the solution public? Something better than posting to 4chan? Is it possible to publish a result properly if one is not a mathematician and not affiliated with an institution?
- JorgeGT 8y agoYou can send it to a journal as a private individual, but probably a better way would to post a manuscript on arxiv.org, and once it generates certain buzz (if the problem is interesting and well solved) then either submit it to a journal yourself or partner with other mathematician to polish it, etc. and then submit.
- whitecream 8y agoTo be able to submit to arXiv, one needs to be endorsed by someone in the domain, which could be a potential hurdle for someone not in academia. (and I'm not about to suggest viXra as a way to get around that)
- Grue3 8y agoYeah, I actually used to be a math post-graduate and have a draft of a paper with an interesting result, so I wanted to publish it but I had no idea how to get "endorsed". This was like 10 years ago and I switched to a career in programming so I doubt I'll even understand my own proof now.
- izzydata 8y agoOne problem with linking to anything on 4chan is that it will be purged within the day and no longer available.
- huntie 8y agoYou can always make use of the various archive sites. The thread referred to is from 2011, and is available on warosu[1]. It is worth noting that 4chan keeps its own 2 week archive now as well. [1] https://warosu.org/sci/thread/S3751105#p3751197 https://warosu.org/sci/thread/S3751105#p3751197
- dijhrykl 8y agoFor those not familiar with the series in question, there's a reason why, if you're going to choose a TV series to discuss permutations, you'd choose Haruhi. "The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya" is a 14-episode anime adaptation which aired in 2006. Unusually, it broadcast its episodes not in chronological order, but in a mixed order, but for good theatrical reason; the series comprises a main plot arc, and various self-contained episodes which chronologically occur after it. Rather than have the climax of the series come halfway through, the self-contained episodes are distributed in between the episodes of the main plot arc. It sounds mad, but it actually worked very well. This idiosyncrasy was explicitly referenced by the episodes themselves: the "next episode" preview at the end of every episode has one of the characters say "The next episode is episode X", then another character says "Wrong! The next episode is episode Y", where X and Y are the numbers according to broadcast and chronological order. Amusingly the story gets more complicated from here. After the series was unexpectedly popular in the anglosphere, it got licensed for an official release. After the contract was signed and it was too late to change it, the company which licensed it noticed the contract had a stock clause in it requiring the episodes to be released on DVD in chronological order. They were unable to get this changed, whereas the strong fan preference was for the broadcast order. As a partial workaround, I recall they released a special edition with the same episodes on two sets of discs: one in broadcast order and one in chronological order. But the DVD "chronological order" isn't quite chronological either; one of the episodes is a show-within-a-show, a film made by the characters of the series. This happens chronologically late in the show, but it is the first episode in both the broadcast and DVD order (which makes for an extremely confusing introduction to the series). So there are at least three different plausible ways to watch the series: broadcast order, chronological order, and DVD order (which is almost like chronological order but not quite). This absurd legacy makes the series rather the obvious choice for discussing permutations of episodes. (My own preference is for yet another permutation: broadcast order, but with the aforementioned first episode moved to before the 12th episode, which relates to it.)
- PurpleRamen 8y ago> "The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya" is a 14-episode anime adaptation which aired in 2006. The first version to be correctly. They later added another 14 episodes, but instead of calling it a new season, they mixed in the new episodes between the old episodes and rebroadcasted it as one complete series. As a special "joke", they also had a timeloop-story spanning multiple episodes, with each episodes telling the same story with slight changes in the story, and individual art-style, meaniung each episodes was produced new not just recycled from the first episode. The "joke" with this story was, that of the 14 new episodes, the timeloop-story filled 8(!) episodes and went under the funny name "Endless Eight". I think someone was fired himself for this.
- mohammedbin 8y agoSomething I somehow doubt too many of you would know but 4chan, despite being considered an unsavoury place because of certain subsections of it (which I'm not proud to admit I visit to learn what "the other side" is talking about), has a lot of great communities as well and I usually find the discussion quality there better than reddit. Also, in the context of this thread, 4chan is an ephemeral site so there is no such thing as link to content.
- krustyburger 8y agoWhat are some of the worthwhile communities?
- newen 8y agoIt's all shit now. The only people who are left are those who can stand racist comments every other thread. It's funny, when a community pretends to be stupid for the funnies, it's not too soon before the actual stupid people move in.
- Loughla 8y agoMy experience is that everything except the huge 'purposefully stupid' boards and those directly dedicated to pornography are what people call the worthwhile communities. That being said, the entire thing is still 99% garbage, dick jokes, gay jokes, Trump circle-jerk and alt-right circlejerk, and shock content. But the 'worthwhile' boards are not 99.9% garbage like /r9k/ or /b/.
- hood_syntax 8y agoIf you are a video game enthusiast, particularly of a niche genre, /vg/ can be a good place. I'm really into roguelikes, so I visit the '/rlg/' thread around once a week to see what's going on and potentially get some advice if I'm at a tricky part in a run or need to make a decision about where to take my character. Standard disclaimer applies about 4chan. If you're thin-skinned, you may find it not worth the trouble. Just don't engage with the trolls and you'll be fine.
- 8y ago
- maze-le 8y agoThis might be a ghost discussion. I have worked in scientific publishing for quite some time and have seen citations in the form of: * personal correspondence * emails * facebook profile pages and my personal highlight * google search queries (I kid you not) All of these citations actually occured in scientific journals. I assume Nicolas Bourbaki was also cited several times, without anyone caring about "academically correct" citation rules. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki
- internet555 8y agoWow I did this in high school but I got in trouble Citations: -Google -Nicolas Bourbaki -Rob’s Facebook wall -My friend in gchat
- saagarjha 8y agoHopefully you got in trouble for your poor citation format, not your sources.
- internet555 8y agoI got in trouble for everything! And everyone hated me
- mathiscool 8y agoAnyone remember "Good Will Hunting"?
- jhallenworld 8y agoBack in the 90s there was the same discussion involving citing USENET news postings. I would suggest that some of the news postings were better peer reviewed than Journal articles. There was certainly a time when the top academics of certain fields were USENET junkies. I suppose hacker news is the most recent equivalent.
- creative1thr 8y ago>I suppose hacker news is the most recent equivalent. It looks like 4chan may be the most recent equivalent : )
- tokai 8y agoIt is a fun little event that something posted on 4chan is used in a research paper. But that nobody knows how it should be cited is just plain wrong. They should maybe contact their research library and get a introduction to citing. All citation styles I know of can handle web citations. Anonymous authors is nothing new either. And you have things like the internet archive or Webcite[0] to make sure the web document doesn't disappear. Else it could be cited as personal communication, which usually covers direct communication, but can also be used for nonarchived discussion groups. The reluctance to cite a source because it's not a peer reviewed research paper, is bordering on cargo cult science. As if going through the motions of scientific publishing should somehow elevate arguments to truth. [0]https://www.webcitation.org/ https://www.webcitation.org/
- yipbub 8y agoI'm not in academia. How is it possible for people to check if the proof is peer reviewed? Do they have to rely on their own verification?
- syn0byte 8y agoIt's a proof. It validates itself or it doesn't.
- TimTheTinker 8y agoNot so fast. Yes, many proofs do follow from formal logic and maths, but new proofs often connect things or draw inferences that haven't been done previously, thus requiring human review to verify.
- throwawaymath 8y agoThat's a non-answer. Peer review is a thing in mathematics precisely because it's difficult to verify if a proof is valid. In a sense you can say something like, "A proof is valid or it isn't", but that's vacuous because you still need someone to check it. There are many examples available of proofs which have been initially accepted but later discredited in the mathematical community. There are also many examples of proofs which have been polarizing from their first publication. Consider the controversy surrounding Mochizuki and his Inter-Universal Teichmuller Theory. Also consider that there have been credible (though ultimately incorrect) proofs published by credible people for several famous problems, such as P = NP. The academic community at large can't just eyeball a proof and know it to be true, and often even fundamentally flawed proofs require more than a week of careful attention to be declared incorrect. If you want to argue that peer review is an imperfect system then that's one thing. But to say that a proof is demonstrably true or it isn't ignores the entire complexity of actually figuring out whether or not it's true. Some people can rely upon their own ability to do this, but for the most part the mathematical community is so heavily specialized that even most mathematicians cannot find errors in advanced proofs unless it's their particular subfield of research.
- mschuetz 8y agoIn real-time rendering, a lot of innovation and state-of-the-art is published in non-peer-reviewed conference slides by companies, or blog posts by non-academic individuals. These should absolutely be cited if you as a researcher are convinced they are correct. There is no good reason not to.
- CogitoCogito 8y agoSome people here talk of the difficulty of citing sources that may disappear. This can easily be solved by just reproducing the proof (and stating explicitly that that is what you're doing and providing references to the ephemeral sources as they exist when you write it). Of course you should clean up the proof as much as possible. This only needs to be done once since others can site your reproduction of the proof if they have similar misgivings.
- snvzz 8y agoWhat's so hard about attributing it to Anon?
- Varcht 8y agoThe Anon's Dilemma. To dox, or not to dox oneself, as an anime fan, in order to advance career.
- dbcooper 8y agoA 4chan poster told me that it was the Russian guy who turned down the Fields Medal (Grigori Perelman?). Take that with a grain of salt.
- acqq 8y ago...who previously jumped out of the plane in the middle of the night over the forest with the blackmailed money, badly functioning parachute and survived, contrary to common sense. Because the posters there wouldn't try to troll. Yes, take that with... whatever.
- maerF0x0 8y agoNaive thought: Some undergrad or masters should do some work to validate the work and write a paper about the validation. Then they'll be cited by anyone who wants to use the 4chan thing
- adamrezich 8y agoIf anyone's trying to figure out what the "Haruhi Problem" is, logically, because it took me awhile to grok: You have a `n`-episode show, and you want to watch every episode in every possible order. However, if one series-watch-through ends with episode `x` and the next series-watch-through in sequence begins with that same episode `x`, you don't have to watch episode `x` twice in a row. Given these constraints, how do you find the "ideal" way to watch through the entire series, in all possible combinations, in the shortest number of episodes?
- theogravity 8y agoThe "Haruhi" part refers to a novel/manga/anime/game series titled "Haruhi Suzumiya", where the anime episodes were purposely aired out of order.
- ncmncm 8y agoThe authors of FFTW published a paper about their computational method, an early example of "cache-oblivious" array traversal order. (In this method, uses of elements noodle around in small areas, getting a free locality boost. Typically they use a Hilbert or Peano path.) They refused to cite Todd Veldhuizen, who had done it (with plenty of publicity) a year before. They refused to discuss why, but it is apparent that it was because Veldhuizen had published in Dr. Dobb's Journal of Computer Orthodontia ("Running light without overbyte").
- thatindiandude 8y agoI believe you should cite by referencing with the meme of your choice
- manfredo 8y agoIsn't board name (/o/, /vg/, etc.) and post ID (the number people talk about when they say "trips", "dubs", and so forth) enough to uniquely identify a 4chan post?
- SilasX 8y agoOh man, I wish a mainstream publication would pick this up, it would be a great /r/notTheOnion submission.
- SilasX 8y agoAlso, didn't 4chan invent SleepSort? https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall13/cos226/lectures/52Tries.pdf https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall13/cos226/l... tl;dr: Iterate through each value v and spawn a process that waits v seconds before writing itself as output. Edit: Earliest HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2657277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2657277
- scott_s 8y agoI have co-authored a paper where we cited the solution in a StackOverflow post. See reference 1: https://www.scott-a-s.com/files/debs2017_daba.pdf https://www.scott-a-s.com/files/debs2017_daba.pdf I noticed that in a paper written by different authors, rather than citing the StackOverflow post when discussing that solution, cited our paper above.