User talk:Charles R Greathouse IV/Is this sequence interesting

I pretty much agree with all that you wrote. I did notice that you use real examples where I used fictional examples (e.g., vigesimal Horace numbers), but I think that here there is no danger that someone will massively miss the point and feel compelled to send in powers of 1652. Alonso del Arte 00:02, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

I'm tempted to copy "A new result from the literature" into my own page.

How do you feel about sequences that look a lot like A000027 but have a difference within term visibility? (The complement may or may not be an interesting sequence, and it may or may not already be in the OEIS). There is at least one like that on the "docket." Alonso del Arte 19:30, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

Feel free, of course, to copy (and modify as needed) anything you like.

One of my motivations in writing this was to give more realistic examples. I felt like a person could violate one of your guidelines without knowing that they did, since the examples all seemed (to me) like things that no one does or think they do. Also by moving examples closer to "the line" I hoped to give more guidance.

We certainly have many sequences that meet your description: see for example User:Charles R Greathouse IV/Properties#Relationships between sequences which gives a slightly different formalization of that concept. I'm not bothered by sequences of that type, provided it's their most natural form and that they're otherwise interesting. Of course those are far from obvious.

Charles R Greathouse IV 20:14, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

They were all inspired by actual submissions, some of which have been rejected.

But yeah, I can see how someone would read mine and say "That's not me at all. I don't look at primes of the form $10^{k}+c$, I look at squares of the form $n\phi (k)+c$." Alonso del Arte 00:12, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

Really? Then I take that back, I guess. But they all seemed very far out there.

On the second point, you took the concrete route and I the abstract. It's not obvious which is more clear but perhaps between the two of us the idea will be conveyed?

Charles R Greathouse IV 03:45, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

I did not want to offend. But some of the people who've submitted a lot of keyword:less sequences seem rather thick-skinned.

Maybe the vast majority of OEIS contributors are smart enough to understand either one and not completely miss the point if they were to read one of them. Alonso del Arte 17:05, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

Neil's view

These are points that I gleaned from an interview of Neil. They reflect my understanding, but should stay fairly close to his view.

Criteria:

• Is it well-defined?
• Would other people be interested? Should be interesting to more than one person.

Marginal:

• E.g., containing 666 as a substring of their decimal digits
• Perhaps interesting to some people, perhaps should be included

Problematic sequences:

• Silly sequences with no particular merit (we have standards, we don't accept junk)
• Too-specialized sequences
• Really far-fetched
• Personal information: phone numbers, social security numbers
• Short finite personal sequences
  • But some finite sequences come up often enough: e.g., A069892, numbers around a roulette wheel
• Those designed to exaggerate the importance of the work of a friend of the author
• Sequences made specifically for the OEIS

Perhaps I will turn this into a page some time. For now I leave it for idea-mining.

Charles R Greathouse IV 20:54, 30 August 2012 (UTC)