Interesting Recreational Sequence
Hans Havermann
hahaj at rogers.com
Sun Jan 25 20:57:29 CET 2004
I wrote:
> I've just added more terms and made a comment-correction to Amarnath
> Murthy's A078249 (Smallest multiple of n using all the digits other
> than used by n, or 0 if no such number exists.). The first 125 terms
> are:
<snip>
> The reason I'm bringing this sequence to the list is because i feel
> strongly that there ought to be more qualifiers, above and beyond
> those already stated, that will enable an n-th term not to exist. I'm
> approaching this by brute force, trying to find the smallest index-n
> for which I cannot find a(n) ...
The current qualifiers are: "a(n) = 0 if n==0 (mod 10), n ends in 5 and
uses 0, n uses all even digits, or n uses all 9 non-zero digits."
It hasn't been as speedy as I'd imagined it would be, but here's what
I've got: As a preliminary, I tried the first million multiples of all
numbers less than a million and ended up with 1143 unresolved cases. I
whittled these down to 1054 unresolved cases wherein the index contains
the digits 2, 4, 6, and 8, all but one of them even. I resolved 186 of
these before I ran into 282624. After a couple of days on this number
alone, I decided to look a little closer...
Now, the multiple has to be a multiple of 5 in order to force a final 0.
5 -> ...20
10 -> ...40
15 -> ...60
20 -> ...80
25 -> ...00, and the cycle repeats. So the multiple has to be a
multiple of 25 to force a final 00.
25 -> ...600
50 -> ...200
75 -> ...800
100 -> ...400
125 -> ...000, and the cycle repeats. So the multiple has to be a
multiple of 125 to force a final 000.
125 -> ...8000
250 -> ...6000
375 -> ...4000
500 -> ...2000
625 -> ...0000, and the cycle repeats. So the multiple has to be a
multiple of 625 to force a final 0000.
625 -> ...40000
1250 -> ...80000
1875 -> ...20000
2500 -> ...60000
3125 -> ...00000, and the cycle repeats. So the multiple has to be a
multiple of 3125 to force a final 00000.
3125 -> ...200000
6250 -> ...400000
9375 -> ...600000
12500 -> ...800000
15625 -> ...000000, and the cycle repeats.
And at this point, because the digits to the left of the zeros repeat
as they did for multiples of 5, I feel I can conjecture that there will
never be an odd digit to the left of the zeros. So, would somebody
verify that the 282624th term of this sequence is 0 (and thus
represents the first member of a family that requires a new qualifier)?
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