[seqfan] Re: metadata for Mathematica code

Frank Adams-Watters franktaw at netscape.net
Thu Nov 12 22:59:36 CET 2015


Note that comparing terms to a program has a problem: some of the programs run much too slowly; the test will never finish. Even for sequences where a fast algorithm is known (and hopefully has a function implementing it), there may be other programs present that are not efficient. So you can't do any sort of automatic scan, nor unconditionally test new programs.

Franklin T. Adams-Watters


-----Original Message-----
From: Charles Greathouse <charles.greathouse at case.edu>
To: Sequence Fanatics Discussion list <seqfan at list.seqfan.eu>
Sent: Thu, Nov 12, 2015 12:19 pm
Subject: [seqfan] Re: metadata for Mathematica code


As Eric suggested, I'm very much in favor of doing something along these
lines.
It has a number of different benefits: making it easier to see what
a program
does, splitting consecutive programs by the same author, etc. But
more important
than these, I think, is making it machine-readable. When the
intent of the
program is defined unambiguously, it's possible to check
programs in lots of
interesting ways:
* Does the n-th term match the program's TermFunction?
* Is
the MembershipTestFunction true for all known terms?
* Is the
MembershipTestFunction false for all terms strictly between
existing terms?
*
Does the sequence have a MembershipTestFunction but is nonmonotonic?
* Does the
TermListByMaximumFunction act sensibly (e.g.,
TermListByMaximumFunction[n] is a
subset of TermListByMaximumFunction[n+1])?
* Do two programs of the same type
give the same output?
etc.



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