It’s really fascinating to bump into mentions of NNs from the 60s & 70s. They seems to be quite hot at the time. The paper on the Medial Axis Transform mentions neural networks too, in a way that makes it seem like it was the cool thing to do. By the time I was in college, NNs were very out of fashion.
Here’s the NN problem Neil was working on, and the first sequence in the database: https://oeis.org/A000435
Furthermore, I believe that the PalmPilot's handwriting-recognition engine also had a neural-network component.
Agreed that the usage has increased radically in the last twenty years, but even before the GPU-based revolution, it felt like neural networks were already broadly known and in use across the sciences and engineering. They were just slower :).
We have had 250,000 ML papers written since 2012. That's a lower bound on the number of distinct experiments necessary to find the winning tickets of today. Inventing the step-activated neuron formula was less than 1% of the way here.
Super useful resource.
There's a mildly humorous "How do you know" exchange where someone on HN quizzes the very person most likely to know:
It's nice to see they have a solid plans on how to keep the website running indefinitely.
“In 2009, in order to ensure the long-term future of the database, I set up a non-profit foundation, The OEIS Foundation Inc., a 501(c)(3) Public Charity, whose purpose is to own, maintain and raise funds to support The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Se- quences or OEIS.
On October 26, 2009, I transferred the intellectual property of The On-Line Ency- clopedia of Integer Sequences to the Foundation. A new OEIS with multiple editors was launched on November 11, 2010.
Since then it has been possible for anyone in the world to propose a new sequence or an update to an existing sequence. To do this, users must first register, and then submissions are reviewed by the editors before they become a permanent part of the OEIS. Technically the OEIS is now a “moderated wiki”.
I started writing this article on November 11, 2022, noting that this marked twelve years of successful operation of the online OEIS, and also that the database is in its 59th year of existence.”
Related Mathologer video:
Mathologer - "Why don't they teach Newton's calculus of 'What comes next?'"
> Robert Jackson suggests that if you've completed a difference table and still don't understand the sequence, you should turn the paper through an angle of 60 degrees, say, and start again and perhaps repeat this several times to make a fan of difference tables.
Its online equivalent is the inverse symbolic calculator (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse_Symbolic_Calculator)
Guilty as charged! I learned about this sequence after looking it up in the OEIS, back when I was still a young student.
