[seqfan] Re: Conjectured sequences in the OEIS

[Charles Greathouse]

I'll be honest -- I'm not worried at all about accepting probable-primes in
the OEIS. The chance that a submitted sequence will contain one or more
transposed or mistyped digits is probably over 1%, and the chance that a
logic error caused some terms to be wrong probably exceeds 5%. Editing
helps reduce the number of problems these cause, but there are undoubtedly
many errors yet to be found in the OEIS.

By contrast the expected number of errors in our, say, 30 million terms due
to probable prime tests returning the wrong results is surely less than 1.

Charles Greathouse
Analyst/Programmer
Case Western Reserve University


On Fri, May 23, 2014 at 12:03 AM, Alonso Del Arte
<alonso.delarte at gmail.com>wrote:

> Some cases are clearer than others. There are a lot of sequences "numbers n
> such that (c^n - 1)/(c - 1) is prime." Some of them have comments stating
> that some of the larger terms in the Data field are strong probable primes,
> as opposed to confirmed primes.
>
> And then there's A242797, Numbers n such that (45^n - 1)/44 is prime. It
> seems to me that the first three terms, 19, 53, 167, can be confirmed
> easily enough, with less than an hour of computer time for each. But 3319
> seems to require at least a day to confirm.
>
> Al
>
>
> On Thu, May 22, 2014 at 2:34 PM, Neil Sloane <njasloane at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Dear Seq Fans,
> > Max Alekseyev pointed out that we should clarify our policy on  sequences
> > with one or more conjectured terms. In fact, the way we handle such
> > sequences depends on many factors - we don't have a single rule that
> covers
> > everything. Yet we do have rules. I have described the situation as I see
> > it in a new section in the Style Sheet page on the wiki:
> > *https://oeis.org/wiki/Style_Sheet
> > <https://oeis.org/wiki/Style_Sheet>*
> >
> > *Neil*
> >
> > --
> > Dear Friends, I have now retired from AT&T. New coordinates:
> >
> > Neil J. A. Sloane, President, OEIS Foundation
> > 11 South Adelaide Avenue, Highland Park, NJ 08904, USA.
> > Also Visiting Scientist, Math. Dept., Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ.
> > Phone: 732 828 6098; home page: http://NeilSloane.com
> > Email: njasloane at gmail.com
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> >
> > Seqfan Mailing list - http://list.seqfan.eu/
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Alonso del Arte
> Author at SmashWords.com<
> https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/AlonsoDelarte>
> Musician at ReverbNation.com <http://www.reverbnation.com/alonsodelarte>
>
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