login

Year-end appeal: Please make a donation to the OEIS Foundation to support ongoing development and maintenance of the OEIS. We are now in our 61st year, we have over 378,000 sequences, and we’ve reached 11,000 citations (which often say “discovered thanks to the OEIS”).

A109326
Smallest positive number that requires n steps to be represented as a sum of palindromes using the greedy algorithm.
3
1, 10, 21, 1022, 101023, 1000101024
OFFSET
1,2
COMMENTS
Index of first occurrence of n in A088601.
Presumably this sequence is unbounded. - N. J. A. Sloane, Aug 28 2015
The greedy algorithm means iteration of A261424 until a palindrome is reached. For n = 3, 4, ... we have a(n+1) = 10^L(n) + a(n) + 1 with L(n) = 2^(n-2) + 1 = length(a(n))*2 - 3 for n > 3. We have a(7) <= 10^17 + 1000101025, a(8) <= 10^33 + 10^17 + 1000101026, a(9) <= 10^65 + 10^33 + 10^17 + 1000101027, a(10) <= 10^129 + 10^65 + 10^33 + 10^17 + 1000101028, etc, with conjectured equality. - M. F. Hasler, Sep 08 2015, edited Sep 09 2018
LINKS
M. F. Hasler, Sum of palindromes, OEIS wiki, Sept. 2015.
FORMULA
a(n) = Sum_{0 <= k <= n-3} 10^(2^k+1) + n - 82, for n > 2 (conjectured). - M. F. Hasler, Sep 08 2015
PROG
(Python) # uses functions in A088601
def afind(limit):
record = 0
for i in range(1, limit+1):
steps = A088601(i)
if steps > record: print(i, end=", "); record = steps
afind(10**6) # Michael S. Branicky, Jul 12 2021
CROSSREFS
KEYWORD
nonn,base,more
AUTHOR
David Wasserman, Aug 11 2005
EXTENSIONS
Edited by N. J. A. Sloane, Aug 28 2015
STATUS
approved