[HN Gopher] The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences
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       The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences
        
       Author : pseudolus
       Score  : 150 points
       Date   : 2021-04-17 23:57 UTC (23 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (oeis.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (oeis.org)
        
       | kingsuper20 wrote:
       | I suggest a mega-CISC architecture where all of those sequences
       | are represented by an opcode.
        
       | dang wrote:
       | If curious, past threads:
       | 
       |  _The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21366618 - Oct 2019 (28
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _The online encyclopaedia of integer sequences_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18524115 - Nov 2018 (3
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences [pdf]_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18015493 - Sept 2018 (4
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15900294 - Dec 2017 (1
       | comment)
       | 
       |  _Pictures from the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11711212 - May 2016 (5
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _The Surprising Power of Neil Sloane's Encyclopedia of Integer
       | Sequences_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10435690 - Oct
       | 2015 (7 comments)
       | 
       |  _The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9919535 - July 2015 (19
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Neil Sloane: the man who loved only integer sequences_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9380292 - April 2015 (2
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6650490 - Oct 2013 (20
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2496629 - April 2011 (7
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=888577 - Oct 2009 (2
       | comments)
       | 
       | I thought there were larger ones...perhaps somebody will find
       | one.
        
       | surfsvammel wrote:
       | This is great for Advent of Code:)
        
         | forgotpwd16 wrote:
         | There're few times some well-known sequences have appeared in
         | AoC. Examples are Manhattan distances (OEIS:A214526) and square
         | sums spiral (OEIS:A141481) in 2017d3, tribonacci (OEIS:A000073)
         | in 2020d10, and Van Eck's sequence (OEIS:A181391) in 2020d15.
        
       | bear8642 wrote:
       | Thanks for reminding me of this.
       | 
       | It's very useful identifying known patterns and also discovering
       | new patterns by entering random number strings
        
       | alufers wrote:
       | I like how everybody here uses this website for some profound
       | mathematical purposes, but I once won a cordless drill due to the
       | OEIS in high school. At some hackathon Bosh had a booth with a
       | contest where you had to solve puzzles which consiststed mainly
       | of finishing integer sequences. I remembered this encyclopedia
       | and I found all of them on the oeis.
        
         | YetAnotherNick wrote:
         | It is regularly used in coding contests too where some hard
         | challenge can sometimes be found out to be some maths formula.
        
           | FabHK wrote:
           | Yeah, OEIS also helps with quite a few Project Euler
           | problems.
           | 
           | https://projecteuler.net
        
       | quakeguy wrote:
       | Good article about Sloane here:
       | 
       | https://www.theguardian.com/science/alexs-adventures-in-numb...
        
       | mnbv55 wrote:
       | One of the best websites on the internet.
        
       | roenxi wrote:
       | https://oeis.org/A27
       | 
       | Looking at the URL, they got 26 sequences in (including the 0
       | sequence) before someone added the counting numbers.
        
       | thuum7 wrote:
       | Neil Sloane on Numberphile
       | https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLt5AfwLFPxWJXQqPe_llzWmTH...
        
         | imglorp wrote:
         | Neil's got his own channel and just posted an accessible talk
         | about cellular automata and other open problems. He could use
         | some views!
         | 
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ogbsh8KuEM
        
       | uyt wrote:
       | Has there been any progress on https://www.kaggle.com/c/integer-
       | sequence-learning?
        
         | lifthrasiir wrote:
         | There is also an attempt [1] to collect and (largely)
         | synthesize a program for every OEIS sequence in an
         | intentionally constrained DSL.
         | 
         | [1] https://github.com/ckrause/loda
        
           | forgotpwd16 wrote:
           | >In total, there are currently more than 26,000 programs
           | available
           | 
           | Wow, lot of work has gone to it. Why the decision to utilize
           | an assembly language?
        
             | lifthrasiir wrote:
             | As far as I can tell its assembly language is designed for
             | fast synthesis and check (e.g. all programs are known to
             | terminate). There is a "miner" generating programs and
             | checking against existing sequences 24/7, a Twitter bot is
             | also available [1].
             | 
             | [1] https://twitter.com/lodaminer
        
           | glangdale wrote:
           | Thanks for this link. I am working on a superoptimizer and
           | once had the thought that OEIS would be a cool place to look
           | for workloads. It's gratifying that someone else is doing
           | this and having some success.
        
       | ColinWright wrote:
       | I've been involved in a few of these sequences. The most recent
       | is this one:
       | 
       | https://oeis.org/A294249
       | 
       | My early calculations have been superseded so I'm no longer
       | mentioned, but I was involved in the initial calculations for
       | this sequence:
       | 
       | https://oeis.org/A013998
       | 
       | It's an interesting and useful project. Any time you have a thing
       | you don't understand it's worth finding some way of converting it
       | to an integer sequence and then looking it up, just in case.
        
       | svat wrote:
       | The best description of the OEIS I've heard is by Donald Knuth in
       | this fun talk (https://youtu.be/BxQw4CdxLr8) where at 19:50 he
       | says how it lets you "compute your way into the literature":
       | 
       | > _For the last 30 years or more, there has been a wonderful tool
       | for all kinds of problems of this form and it 's been online for
       | a long time: we have the Online Encyclopedia of Integer
       | Sequences. And this is just the nicest thing since sliced bread
       | for mathematics because you can compute your way into the
       | literature. [audience laughter] If you want to know if anybody
       | else has ever studied a problem, all you have to do is evaluate
       | the first few cases of it and then you look it up and there it
       | is. The hit rate is incredible, and all kinds of mathematicians
       | have discovered each other through the OEIS._ [...] _I donate to
       | Wikipedia and the Internet Archive and the OEIS._
       | 
       | (Aside: A good blog post about that lecture:
       | https://thenewstack.io/donald-knuths-christmas-tree-lecture-...)
       | 
       | Indeed I've used it this way many times; the most recent example
       | is that I became curious about how many polynomial functions
       | there are mod n (after posting this comment:
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26482028), and by computing
       | the answers for n up to 10, I was able to look up up those
       | numbers in the OEIS and find the general formula, and also the
       | relevant papers. (Asked a question about it here:
       | https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/4070051/how-many-di...
       | but ended up answering it myself...) I don't think I'd have even
       | known where to look (as I'm not a professional mathematician), if
       | not for the OEIS. And this happens again and again.
        
         | bjoli wrote:
         | I have answered more than a few "what does this code do?" by
         | just doing that.
         | 
         | Feed the code some numbers, look for the output in oeis and
         | bam! Instant guru status.
        
       | glangdale wrote:
       | Always great. A fine technique to compensate for those of us who
       | lack mathematical sophistication: write some godawful brute force
       | code to calculate the number of items in some construct of
       | interest, then search those numbers up to learn all sorts of
       | useful new things about what you have.
       | 
       | I learned about generalizations of the Fibonacci sequence and
       | "half-Catalan numbers" by this method.
        
       | RockofStrength wrote:
       | The OEIS can also be considered a sort of number encyclopedia,
       | especially for large numbers.
       | 
       | It can also be interesting to link geometric observations with
       | unrelated OEIS sequences. For example, the number of rectangles
       | on a square grid turned out to be the octagonal pyramidal
       | numbers.
        
       | nickdrozd wrote:
       | The OEIS is an amazing tool. I recently came across a sequence
       | from an unusual source and then made the shocking discovery that
       | the sequence already existed. It turned out to be a wild
       | coincidence.
       | 
       | Write-up here: https://nickdrozd.github.io/2021/04/12/math-fact-
       | busy-beaver...
        
       | applecrazy wrote:
       | The OEIS is so useful when I have some sequence and I have no
       | clue how to efficiently implement it in code.
       | 
       | More often than not, there's a formula to generate the ith term
       | in the sequence in close to O(1) time.
        
       | Bostonian wrote:
       | What programming language are the sequences coded in? Is the code
       | available?
        
         | ColinWright wrote:
         | The sequences are listed, and in each entry there are usually
         | examples given of how to compute the sequence in multiple
         | programming languages.
        
       | fdiskl wrote:
       | I love this site. Often if I solve a Project Euler problem of the
       | form "what is the xth element...", after I solve it, I will look
       | at the first several elements in the sequence and start seeing
       | where else the sequence is used.
        
       | tshaddox wrote:
       | I like the self-referential sequences, like "Numbers n such that
       | OEIS sequence A_n contains n." https://oeis.org/A053873
        
         | tromp wrote:
         | I like the closely related "Numbers n such that OEIS sequence
         | A_n doesn't contain n."
        
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       (page generated 2021-04-18 23:03 UTC)