OEIS gripes

[Antti Karttunen]

"David W. Wilson" wrote:

>
> In the early days of working on the EIS, I could characterize the mistakes
> I found as few and honest.  Lately, however, I am finding an overwhelming
> number of sequences that are irrelevant, indecipherable, and innaccurate
> due to just plain carelessness.

What if EIS _required_ people always to submit also the procedure
with which they computed the sequence, or a link to the source
file if it is a larger program? At least I try to include the needed Maple
procedures with almost every sequence I submit (to the point of clumsiness),
just as giving an ultimate reference point "what I meant it to be",
even if subsequent processing introduced errors to the terms themselves,
or in case my "not always mathematically 100% correct" terminology
would be unclear.
  Also, the submitted code might provide a starting point for somebody
else inspired for creating a few variants.


I guess if EIS were launched now, these procedures (say
in Maple/Mathematica/Pari/Perl/Lisp/etc) could be standardized so
that EIS could produce more terms on the fly, for the most of
the sequences.


>
> In my last message, I critiqued the sequences on the recent sequence
> list in order to illustrate my concern.  Note that these sequences have
> already entered the database.  Among them, I found several that were just
> plain wrong, many of these, when corrected, were already in the database.
> There were others that had only few elements, most of these could easily
> have been extended by the author to full length; instead they were
> submitted with a "more" keyword in expectation that someone else would
> later finish the sequence.

I sometimes do this, that is, compute only ten to sixteen terms, although
more than that would fit. That's because doing anything with Maple V4,
especially any binary computations (XOR, etc) not natively supported,
is so sluggish.


Terveisin,

Antti Karttunen