arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Mustazee Rahman.
We give a combinatorial interpretation of a classical meta-Fibonacci sequence defined by G(n) = n - G(G(n-1)) with the initial condition G(1) = 1, which appears in Hofstadter's 'Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid'. The interpretation is in terms of an infinite labelled tree. We then show a few corollaries about the behaviour of the sequence G(n) directly from the interpretation.
We apply a tree-based methodology to solve new, very broadly defined families of nested recursions of the general form R(n)=sum_{i=1}^k R(n-a_i-sum_{j=1}^p R(n-b_{ij})), where a_i are integers, b_{ij} are natural numbers, and k,p are natural numbers that we use to denote "arity" and "order," respectively, and with some specified initial conditions. The key idea of the tree-based solution method is to associate such recursions with infinite labelled trees in a natural way so that the solution to the recursions solves a counting question relating to the corresponding trees. We characterize certain recursion families within R(n) by introducing "simultaneous parameters" that appear both within the recursion itself and that also specify structural properties of the corresponding tree. First, we extend and unify recently discovered results concerning two families of arity k=2, order p=1 recursions. Next, we investigate the solution of nested recursion families by taking linear combinations of solution sequence frequencies for simpler nested recursions, which correspond to superpositions of the associated trees; this leads us to identify and solve two new recursion families for arity k=2 and general order p. Finally, we extend these results to general arity k>2. We conclude with several related open problems.
The solutions to certain nested recursions, such as Conolly's C(n) = C(n-C(n-1))+C(n-1-C(n-2)), with initial conditions C(1)=1, C(2)=2, have a well-established combinatorial interpretation in terms of counting leaves in an infinite binary tree. This tree-based interpretation, which has a natural generalization to a k-term nested recursion of this type, only applies to homogeneous recursions, and only solves each recursion for one set of initial conditions determined by the tree. In this paper, we extend the tree-based interpretation to solve a non-homogeneous version of the k-term recursion that includes a constant term. To do so we introduce a tree-grafting methodology that inserts copies of a finite tree into the infinite k-ary tree associated with the solution of the corresponding homogeneous k-term recursion. This technique can also be used to solve the given non-homogeneous recursion with various sets of initial conditions.
For many meta-Fibonacci sequences it is possible to identify a partition of the sequence into successive intervals (sometimes called blocks) with the property that the sequence behaves "similarly" in each block. This partition provides insights into the sequence properties. To date, for any given sequence, only ad hoc methods have been available to identify this partition. We apply a new concept - the spot-based generation sequence - to derive a general methodology for identifying this partition for a large class of meta-Fibonacci sequences. This class includes the Conolly and Conway sequences and many of their well-behaved variants, and even some highly chaotic sequences, such as Hofstadter's famous Q-sequence.