It's easy to imagine them being haunted by chains of letters constantly charging through hyperactive minds.
Dr. Milgram, who died in 1984, called his study the Small World Problem and wound up with 60 completed chains of letters that averaged six senders.
In the different atom-type E-state index, the set of bonds to a skeletal atom is given by a chain of lowercase letters: s (single), d (double), t (triple), and a (aromatic).
So for our collaborative word problem tonight, let's do one that we've seen before as an analog of the de Bruijn sequence in "The Math Behind The Magic": You have to construct the longest possible chain of 3-letter words where the second word begins with the last two letters of the first word.
The idea was to create the longest possible chain of unique six letter words such that the last three letters of the first word are the same as the first three letters of the next one, such as CONTRA TRAVEL VELCRO and so on.
While these sorts of chain letters might seem like a pretty trivial form of fake news to worry about, the problem of false rumors spreading like lightning across WhatsApp's platform has been linked to far more serious consequences.
They can sell their paintings by the metre, post their works in the form of chain letters, make art that cannot be bought because it melts, burns, explodes or never existed as a tangible object in the first place.
That's all fine and dandy – no harm in having fun – and I realize well that Twitter's trending topics are not necessarily required to be giving you and me an overview of stuff that really matters, but I can't help but think it's a pity that that list is starting to turn into the top 10 of chain letters people used to circulate through e-mail messages in the late nineties.
Before the site was updated, there was no character limit for questions or answers, but this allowed the creation of chain letters, so the administrators decided to set a character limit.
