LODA is an unusual project: it applies distributed computing not to solve a fixed problem, but to search for programs that generate integer sequences. The Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS) catalogs hundreds of thousands of integer sequences — prime numbers, Fibonacci numbers, Catalan numbers, partitions of integers, and countless more obscure mathematical curiosities. Many OEIS entries have no known closed-form formula or efficient algorithm. LODA's volunteers collectively discover them.
The project is built around the LODA language — a simple assembly-like instruction set designed for integer arithmetic. Volunteers' computers mutate and combine millions of candidate LODA programs, executing each one to see whether its output matches a known OEIS sequence. When a match is found, it becomes a new formula: a concise, executable algorithm for computing that sequence. Many such discoveries are genuinely novel, capturing mathematical structure no human had noticed.
As of February 2026, the collaboratively mined database contains over 150,000 discovered programs matching OEIS sequences. Recent work integrates the LEAN theorem prover to formally verify mined formulas, raising confidence that discovered programs capture genuine mathematical identities rather than coincidences.
LODA is a creative inversion of classic volunteer computing: instead of a fixed scientific simulation, it's an automated mathematician, and every volunteer contributes to a living library of algorithmic discoveries. The entire stack — language, miner, database, discovered programs — is open source, available for any mathematician to build on.