As someone without a math-degree, OEIS has been surprisingly great just for helping bridge "my unscalable brute force test program spit out these numbers" to "oh, that's what what this kinda thingy is called and what class of problem it is."
Let me give you a concrete example, back from some online puzzle by a Large Internet Search company. You have X items of unique heights, and the question is how many ways you can line them up so that someone looking from one end can see Y distinct non-occluded heights, and someone looking from the other side can see Z distinct heights.
IIRC manually experimenting with small numbers revealed a pattern that OEIS said was Stirling Numbers of the first kind [0]. Simply having this jargon/label available made it possible to access work other people did on it in the past.
Let me give you a concrete example, back from some online puzzle by a Large Internet Search company. You have X items of unique heights, and the question is how many ways you can line them up so that someone looking from one end can see Y distinct non-occluded heights, and someone looking from the other side can see Z distinct heights.
IIRC manually experimenting with small numbers revealed a pattern that OEIS said was Stirling Numbers of the first kind [0]. Simply having this jargon/label available made it possible to access work other people did on it in the past.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_numbers_of_the_first_...