OEIS on vacation in December

[franktaw at netscape.net]

I don't think there's anybody who has made more than a handful of 
contributions to the OEIS (and not many of those with only a few, 
either) who has not contributed a number of very good sequences.

On the other hand, I don't think there's anybody who has made more than 
a handful of contributions who hasn't contributed at least a few 
sequences of little or no value (myself included).

I've been trying to avoid pointing fingers here, and I going to 
continue avoiding it.

What I am saying is, think twice before submitting anything.  Ask 
yourself,
* is this really of general interest?
* do I have arbitrary parameters in this sequence?  If so, are they as 
simple as possible?
* is the definition as simple as possible, or are there extra 
conditions which could be removed without changing the general behavior 
of the sequence?  (For an extreme example, A067992 used to have the 
condition a(n+1) != a(n).  The sole effect of removing this condition 
was to add an additional 1 at the beginning of the sequence.)

In particular, sequences "primes of the form ..." (or "primes in A...") 
and "n such that ... is prime" (or "indices of primes in A...") are 
unlikely to be of any independent interest.  (The sequence of primes is 
sufficiently irregular that it is nearly certain that these will not 
match any sequence from any other branch of mathematics,  nor even a 
sequence of primes from some other sequence.)  The main sequences have 
already had these done; don't do it unless there is some reason why 
primes in this particular sequence are of interest.  (This goes for 
semiprimes, too.)

If you're considering submitting a whole family of sequences, you 
probably shouldn't.  In addition to the questions above, ask yourself,
* Can I pick out one or a few typical examples, and just submit those?
* Is there an array or other table I can submit, instead of individual 
sequences?

If you still think you want to submit the whole family, I would 
recommend asking the seqfan group before proceeding.

Franklin T. Adams-Watters

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