If you wanted to watch 14 episodes of the anime The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya in every possible order, what’s the shortest string of episodes you’d need to watch?
There are 14 episodes in the first season of Haruhi, a 2006 anime based on a series of Japanese light novels. The episodes, which feature time travel and are otherwise chronologically challenging for the viewer, originally aired in a nonlinear order. When the series went to DVD, the episodes were rearranged, and it’s become something of an obsession for fans to rewatch the series over and over again, going through as many chronologies as possible.
Pantone crunched the numbers of the Haruhi problem and found that you’d need to watch at least 93,884,313,611 episodes to watch the season in any possible order. At most, you’d need to watch 93,924,230,411 episodes to accomplish the task. There’s still a ways to go to narrow down the exact answer, but they’re getting there.