6533b853fe1ef96bd12ad374

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Integer Complexity: Experimental and Analytical Results II

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We consider representing natural numbers by expressions using only 1’s, addition, multiplication and parentheses. Let \( \left\| n \right\| \) denote the minimum number of 1’s in the expressions representing \(n\). The logarithmic complexity \( \left\| n \right\| _{\log } \) is defined to be \({ \left\| n \right\| }/{\log _3 n}\). The values of \( \left\| n \right\| _{\log } \) are located in the segment \([3, 4.755]\), but almost nothing is known with certainty about the structure of this “spectrum” (are the values dense somewhere in the segment?, etc.). We establish a connection between this problem and another difficult problem: the seemingly “almost random” behaviour of digits in the base-3 representation of the numbers \(2^n\).