[seqfan] A032435 and A032436 Josephus problem data mismatch

Sean A. Irvine sairvin at gmail.com
Mon Jun 22 03:51:20 CEST 2020


Hi all,

The triangles in A032434 through A032436 concern the Josephus problem.
That's the problem where n people stand in a circle and then you go round
and round killing every k-th person until nearly everyone is dead.

The data in A032435 and A032436 do not match what I expect.

There are links from these sequences into Mathworld.  The Mathworld entry
contains two triangles which do contain the data I expect and which also
point back to these OEIS entries.  Neither of the triangles in the
Mathworld entry actually seem to be present in the OEIS.

However, we don't simply want to replace the existing data in A032435 and
A032436, since the current data values are likely related to this problem
somehow.  I spent a couple of hours looking at the current data values and
could not determine an explanation, perhaps someone else will have more
success.

Sean.



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