13 Sep
2006
13 Sep
'06
5:08 p.m.
Heh! Actually, I've found a marvelous cycle of length 442783582734897230450239994058234089230450023451234951 but the margin is too small to contain the start value! More seriously, it's always seemed to me that Collatz might be a member of some parametric family--including others like 3n-1, 3n+5, 17n+7, 105n+69...say. Then a "real" answer would be a theory that predicts the cycle structure given the parameters--as opposed to just this one instance. Or, perhaps at least a negative result such as that it's incomputably chaotic...