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Talk:Growth of sequences
What now?
Is there any good way to encode this information for sequences? Half-baked thoughts:
- Use the index. Con: hard to keep in synch, huge list, clutters index, not feasible to search
- Use a dedicated page or pages on the wiki. Con: can't see from entry, not feasible to search.
- Wiki-style categories. Pro: arbitrary nesting. Con: hard to implement.
- New keywords. Con: many keywords needed, clutters keywords.
- New field parallel to keywords. Con: a pain to implement, many terms needed.
Cons shared by all these approaches:
- None of these allow the natural partial orders to show through, which would be very nice (and allows expansion, e.g. splitting a category in half).
- None of these conveniently allow sequences with lower bounds different from upper bounds.
- None allow more information where that is known.
To overcome these difficulties, a specialized field would be needed. For example:
0: [1, 0, -1; 0.5]
might mean with the initial 0 meaning "take exp this number of times (or log if negative)". Two such fields, giving upper and lower bounds, would allow two-sided searches. But this has problems of its own: not only is it hard to implement and populate, but it's not clear how a user can enter searches (what would be intuitive?). So this isn't obviously better than other approaches.
I would be interested in new suggestions, improvements on existing ones, additional pros and cons, or preferences for or against any of these.
Charles R Greathouse IV 19:16, 26 January 2012 (UTC)
- Maximilian Hasler likes the idea of categories, and gives specific suggestions here: User talk:M. F. Hasler/Categories. Charles R Greathouse IV 19:36, 26 January 2012 (UTC)