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I love the idea of using OEIS to automate finding mathematical patterns in the solution. Also, plotting the search space immediately is something I know is ofte
by bspammer 7y ago
I love the idea of using OEIS to automate finding mathematical patterns in the solution. Also, plotting the search space immediately is something I know is often unreasonably effective, but I almost never take the time to do. This is a fantastic little article.
- glangdale 7y agoGiven that I'm a bit of a moron mathematically, I have, more times than I cared to admit, made serious progress on a problem by (a) writing a Python or C++ program to spew out a highly non-scalable count of some entity whose nature I'm trying to understand and (b) taking that count and sticking it in OEIS. This has led to some pretty major insights, which one can carefully 'launder' casually as something you knew all along. "Oh, of course the number of subtrees can be found by half-Catalan numbers", you say, with aplomb, as if you hadn't learned about half-Catalan numbers approximately 10 minutes ago.