Complaints About Editing/2013

Complaints About Editing/2013

August

• At the end of July I added a sequence which amounted to the results of a prime number sieve. The sequence was all the prime numbers after 7 including 1 and 49 in order. The sieve uses a geometric candidacy sequence with a system of digital-root symmetries/congruencies (for lack of better terminology). The proposed sequence was quickly accepted and approved by T.D. Noe (perhaps to get more eyes on it?). During the process of improving the definition of the entry, Joerg Arndt made a few helpful edits in conjunction with snarky comments, and he ultimately killed off the sequence with a recycle while claiming that speed of sieving is his primary benchmark for novelty. Our sieve is similar to the Croft Spiral sieve, which some consider a good way to generate primes, but ours makes more use of digital-root symmetries (as a result of his sieve Croft has gone on to study digital-root symmetries that underlie the distribution of the primes). I added our sieve's sequence in response to J.W. Helkenberg completing the 24 sequences of primes which he has been calculating by hand and adding to OEIS since 2010 (Helkenberg has gone on to study digital-root/last-digit symmetries that underlie prime distribution). In response to the sieve being accepted, Helkenberg also added 24 more sequences which distribute the square primes, but these sequences were also killed off because they are reduced to quadratic equations by computer algebra systems, although Helkenberg uses Fibonacci-like sequences to generate his contributions. We feel the editors are short-sighted or antagonistic in their trashing of these sequences, and we are requesting an appeal of their decisions. "Your sieve is not fast enough, I see no novelty here," and "these sequences are just quadratic equations" are weak and/or obfuscated attempts at debunking interesting sequences that have unstudied implications. — Derek P. Moore 14:14, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

• Response from N. J. A. Sloane, Aug 22 2013:

The Ombudsman for the OEIS, Hilarie Orman, looked into the deletion of A225776, and finds that "the sequence received reasonable consideration, the author's comments were noted and the editors communicated their reasoning clearly."

Here is her full report:

I have reviewed the history of the sequence A225776 originally titled "Results of the Moore-Otsuka-Helkenberg prime number sieve" and later "Primes and pseudo-primes of a skip-2-3-5 prime number sieve."

As an ombudsman for OEIS, I have looked at the reviewing process to see if reasonable standards were applied to this entry. The author has said that he did not feel that the editors had good reasons for rejecting the entry and has asked for reconsideration.

In the original submission, the author presents the output of a computer program and claims that that with a few exceptions in its initial behavior, it produces all primes in sequence. The sequence, with the initial oddities, is the subject of the entry.

The editors noted that the sequence has a trivial description. The author's defense is that it is the result of an algorithm that may be a new way of enumerating primes. This puts the focus on the algorithm, rather than the sequence itself.

One editor's comment appears to be a valid reason for the rejection: "... it seems just a simple variant of Eratosthenes sieve (with a wheel factorization technique to skip multiples of 3 or to treat blocks of 9 or 90 numbers at a time) so it is very improbable that a mathematician could find it interesting since much more efficient and sophisticated versions of segmented Eratosthenes sieve with wheel factorization are already available."

The discussion did show some deviations from the OEIS standards for civil discussion (see http://oeis.org/wiki/Good_Behavior_Guide_For_Contributors_and_Editors) by one editor and also by the author. Both should be mindful of their responsibility to uphold good behavior in OEIS discussions.

My opinion is that the sequence received reasonable consideration, the author's comments were noted and the editors communicated their reasoning clearly.

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I think that closes the matter.