| Title | Superanonymous |
|---|---|
| Contributor | David H. Silver(author) |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0526.39 |
| Landing page | https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0526/chapters/10.11647/obp.0526.39 |
| License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ |
| Copyright | David H. Silver |
| Publisher | Open Book Publishers |
| Published on | 2026-04-08 |
| Long abstract | A significant combinatorical breakthrough from an unlikely source: an anonymous 4chan post responding to a question about anime episode viewing orders. Superpermutations are strings containing every possible ordering of n symbols as substrings. For years, mathematicians believed the minimal length followed the pattern of factorial sums observed in small cases. The anonymous poster derived a rigorous lower bound, modeling the problem as path optimization through a permutation graph. This proof remained obscure until 2014 when mathematician Robin Houston rediscovered it, leading to the disproof of the long-standing conjecture and establishing new bounds on this combinatorial problem — with the original derivation still officially credited to “Anonymous 4chan Poster.” |
| Print length | 10 pages |
| Language | English (Original) |
| THEMA |
|
| BISAC |
|
| Keywords |
|
| Landing Page | Full text URL | Platform | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0526/chapters/10.11647/obp.0526.39 | Landing page | https://books.openbookpublishers.com/10.11647/obp.0526.39.pdf | Full text URL |
David H. Silver is an industrial researcher whose career bridges computer vision, computational biology, and science communication. He studied mathematics, computer science, and biology at the Technion — Israel Institute of Technology as a Rothschild Scholar, and was awarded a Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship for his doctoral work in computational biology at Cambridge, UK. Silver’s peer-reviewed publications span multiple domains: computational biology in Nature and PNAS; computer vision systems in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence; medical AI in Human Reproduction and MIDL; and entertainment analysis in PLoS One. He holds over a dozen patents in depth sensing, medical imaging, and generative AI. His industry positions include Algorithm Engineer at Intel Corporation, ML Researcher at Apple, and CTO/co-founder roles at several technology startups. Silver maintains academic collaborations with researchers worldwide and serves as a peer reviewer for Image and Vision Computing and PNAS.