Automatic Invention of Integer Sequences

Simon Colton, Alan Bundy, Toby Walsh

Abstract: We report on the application of the HR program (Colton, Bundy, & Walsh 1999) to the problem of automatically inventing integer sequences. Seventeen sequences invented by HR are interesting enough to have been accepted into the Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (Sloane 2000) and all were supplied with interesting conjectures about their nature, also discovered by HR. By extending HR, we have enabled it to perform a two stage process of invention and investigation. This involves generating both the definition and terms of a new sequence, relating it to sequences already in the Encyclopedia and pruning the output to help identify the most surprising and interesting results.