26 comments

  • OscarCunningham 6 hours ago

    Is there a sequence where the sequence and all its differences contain each positive integer once?

    Something like

        1 3 9   26  66
         2 6  17  40
          4 11  23
           7  12
            5
    
    Oh, here it is: https://oeis.org/A035313
    • thaumasiotes an hour ago

      > Oh, here it is: https://oeis.org/A035313

      That sequence is not known to match what you asked for:

      >> Conjecturally, every positive integer occurs in the sequence or one of its n-th differences, which would imply that the sequence and its n-th differences partition the positive integers.

      For an intuition of why this might be hard to prove, note that you had to insert 7 into your structure before you inserted 5. In the general case, there might be a long waiting period before you're able to place some particular integer n. It might be infinitely long.

    • 6 hours ago
      [deleted]
  • 8organicbits 9 hours ago

    OEIS is such a wonderful reference. I've had occasions where software I was building needed to compute certain sequences, but I hadn't yet figured out the underlying math. I popped the sequence into OEIS and found the closed form solution. It was a huge productivity boost.

    • nurettin 7 hours ago

      For me it was a favorite place to visit every so often. I also really enjoyed mathworld.wolfram.com a few decades ago. (A true shame that he went insane)

      • volemo 6 hours ago

        > A true shame that he went insane

        Could you elaborate on your reasons for calling Eric Weisstein insane?

        • Rexxar 3 hours ago

          He probably intends to call Stephen Wolfram like that. But it's ridiculous to call him insane because he seems a little obsessed by cellular automatons.

        • nurettin 2 hours ago

          Weisstein is amazing. Wolfram has the "unified theory of everything" disease. So much so that he sponsored dozens of youtube channels to talk about it.

      • foodevl 6 hours ago

        I don't know (and don't need you to elaborate on) exactly what you're referring to in that last sentence, but I suspect you are confusing Eric W. Weisstein with Eric Weisstein.

        • quietbritishjim 5 hours ago

          More likely he's confusing the mathworld author with Stephen Wolfram

      • lutusp 3 hours ago

        > A true shame that he went insane

        I assume you're referring to Stephen Wolfram, not Neil Sloane, but it seems many people would like clarification.

        As to Wolfram, assuming this is your focus, nothing undermines one's sanity as reliably as complete success. Not to accept your premise, only to explain it.

  • kleiba 8 hours ago

    Coding exercise: write a function

        boolean isInSequence(n):
    
    that decides whether the given integer is part of that sequence or not. However, pre-storing the sequence and only performing a lookup is not allowed.
    • asboans 4 hours ago

      I don’t know but I think I could probably implement IsInSequenceOrFirstDifferences(n)

    • haskellshill 5 hours ago

      How about the following Haskell program?

          rec ((x:xs),p) = (filter (/= p+x) xs,p+x)
          sequ = map snd $ iterate rec ([2..],1)
      
      sequ is an infinite list of terms of the sequence A005228.
      • sltkr 4 hours ago

        That just enumerates the entire sequence; I think the challenge is to do it faster than that.

        By the way, the use of `filter` makes your implementation unnecessarily slow. (The posted link also contains Haskell code, which uses `delete` from Data.List instead of `filter`, which is only slightly better.)

        I'd solve it like this, which generates both sequences in O(n) time, and the mutual recursion is cute:

            a005228 = 1 : zipWith (+) a005228 a030124
        
            a030124 = go 1 a005228 where
                go x ys
                    | x < head ys = x     : go (x + 1) ys
                    | otherwise   = x + 1 : go (x + 2) (tail ys)
    • vbezhenar 6 hours ago

      Compute the sequence until you get n or m > n?

    • rokob 6 hours ago

      return n >= 0

      • r0uv3n 6 hours ago

        2 for example is not in the sequence. Remember that you need the first differences to this sequence to obtain all natural numbers

        • rokob 5 hours ago

          Hah oh right duh

  • cluckindan 7 hours ago

    Recursive (n choose 2) is my favorite.

    https://oeis.org/A086714

    If you think about it, it quantifies emergence of harmonic interference in the superposition of 4 distinct waveforms. If those waveforms happen to have irrational wavelengths (wrt. each other), their combination will never be in the same state twice.

    This obviously has implications for pseudorandomness, etc.

  • vishnugupta 4 hours ago

    Can someone please explain this to me? I tried to make sense but couldn’t.

    • munchler 4 hours ago

      The initial sequence is 1, 3, 7, 12, 18, 26, 35, etc. The difference between each term in that sequence produces a second sequence: 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, etc. If you merge those two sequences together in sorted order, you get 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, etc. Each whole number appears in the result exactly once.

      • vishnugupta 2 hours ago

        Really good explainer. Thank you!

        • card_zero an hour ago

          By end of the sequence shown on the page, the contiguous part has only reached 61. After that it's full of gaps: it's hit 1689, but has not yet hit 62. The last three differences shown there are 59, 60, 61. So it will list all integers mainly because the differences are increasing similar to the ordinary number line.

    • Horffupolde 4 hours ago

      The sequence union the differences span all integer values.

  • HocusLocus 9 hours ago

    Like 'even and odd' on steroids.