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”).

Number of distinct nonnegative rational numbers that can be obtained in n steps by applying addition, subtraction, multiplication and division to any two potentially identical numbers from the complete set of numbers created in n-1 steps, starting with the set {1}.
3

%I #33 Jul 01 2017 08:43:04

%S 1,3,6,24,300,37761,451572162

%N Number of distinct nonnegative rational numbers that can be obtained in n steps by applying addition, subtraction, multiplication and division to any two potentially identical numbers from the complete set of numbers created in n-1 steps, starting with the set {1}.

%C The conjectured value of a(6)=451572162 needs independent verification.

%C For an explanation of the difference from a straight-line program (SLP) see comment in A288759. A288850 provides the corresponding cardinalities of the sets that can be obtained by an n-step SLP.

%H Hugo Pfoertner, <a href="/A288760/a288760.pdf">Illustration of the Distribution of values generated in steps 3, 4, 5, 6</a>

%H <a href="/index/Com#complexity">Index to sequences related to the complexity of n</a>

%e The sets of numbers >=0 obtainable at the n-th step are:

%e S(0) = { 1 },

%e S(1) = { 0, 1, 2 },

%e S(2) = { 0, 1/2, 1, 2, 3, 4 },

%e S(3) = { 0, 1/8, 1/6, 1/4, 1/3, 1/2, 2/3, 3/4, 1, 4/3, 3/2, 2, 5/2, 3, 7/2, 4, 9/2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 16 }.

%Y Cf. A214872, A216999, A288759, A288850.

%K nonn,hard,more,nice

%O 0,2

%A _Hugo Pfoertner_, Jun 15 2017

%E Wrong a(6) removed by _Hugo Pfoertner_, Jun 19 2017

%E a(6) from _Markus Sigg_, Jul 01 2017