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A005186 a(n) = number of m which take n steps to reach 1 in `3x+1' problem.
(Formerly M0305)
5
1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 4, 4, 6, 6, 8, 10, 14, 18, 24, 29, 36, 44, 58, 72, 91, 113, 143, 179, 227, 287, 366, 460, 578, 732, 926, 1174, 1489, 1879, 2365, 2988, 3780, 4788, 6049, 7628, 9635, 12190, 15409, 19452, 24561, 31025, 39229, 49580, 62680, 79255, 100144 (list; graph; refs; listen; history; internal format)
OFFSET

0,6

REFERENCES

S. N. Anderson, Struggling with the 3x+1 problem, Math. Gazette, 71 (1987), 271-274.

R. K. Guy, personal communication.

J. C. Lagarias, ed., The Ultimate Challenge: The 3x+1 Problem, Amer. Math. Soc., 2010; see p. 33.

N. J. A. Sloane and Simon Plouffe, The Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, Academic Press, 1995 (includes this sequence).

LINKS

T. D. Noe, Table of n, a(n) for n=0..70

Wikipedia, The beginning of the Collatz directed graph

Index entries for sequences related to 3x+1 (or Collatz) problem

FORMULA

Appears to settle into approximately exponential growth after about 25 terms or so with a ratio between adjacent terms of roughly 1.264. - Howard A. Landman (howard(AT)riverrock.org), May 24 2003

David W. Wilson (Jun 10, 2003) gives a heuristic argument that the constant should be the largest eigenvalue of the matrix [ 1 0 0 1 0 0 / 0 0 0 0 1/3 0 / 0 1 0 0 1 0 / 0 0 0 0 1/3 0 / 0 0 1 0 0 1 / 0 0 0 0 1/3 0 ], which is (3 + sqrt(21))/6 = 1.2637626...

PROG

#!/usr/bin/perl @old = ( 1 ); while (1) { print scalar(@old), " "; @new = ( ); foreach $n (@old) { $used{$n} = 1; if (($n % 6) == 4) { $m = ($n-1)/3; push(@new, $m) unless ($used{$m}); } $m = $n + $n; push(@new, $m) unless ($used{$m}); } @old = @new; }

CROSSREFS

Cf. A088975

Sequence in context: A131055 A052928 A137501 * A008642 A001364 A029010

Adjacent sequences:  A005183 A005184 A005185 * A005187 A005188 A005189

KEYWORD

nonn,easy,nice

AUTHOR

N. J. A. Sloane (njas(AT)research.att.com), R. K. Guy

EXTENSIONS

More terms from Larry Reeves (larryr(AT)acm.org), Apr 27 2001

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Last modified February 13 05:18 EST 2012. Contains 205435 sequences.