# Project Euler — Problem 197

I never thought that solving random math problems can be addictive, but Project Euler does exactly that. Not only does it make you flex your math muscles, it also challenges you to take your programming language of choice to its limits. So it’s a total win-win: you brush up on your math skills, and broaden your programming repertoire at the same time.

Once I discovered Project Euler, I couldn’t pull myself away from the computer until I solved as many problems as I could. As of this writing I’ve solved 187 of their 211 problems.

Problem 197 has to do with finding the nth term of a particular recursively defined sequence: $$u_{n+1} = f(u_n)$$ with $$u_0 = -1, f(x) = \lfloor 2^{30.403243784-x^2}\rfloor \cdot 10^{-9}$$

Of course, as with most Project Euler problems, the value for n is set ridiculously high, presumably to eliminate the possibility of brute-forcing the problem (within the lifetime of the universe).

Fortunately, it takes little more than a superficial examination to see that this problem is actually quite simple in disguise. If we look at the first few terms of the sequence, we can already guess that this sequence appears to be “converging” to a function that oscillates between two values, approximately 0.681 and 1.029 (I won’t give precise numbers, since that would give away the solution).

This means that all we need to do is go far enough into the sequence that the deviation of the oscillations is less than the desired precision asked by the problem (10-9). And it so happens that we don’t need to go out far at all. The sequence actually settles on its two oscillatory values as early as the 1000th term (probably even earlier)! Therefore, the sum of the 1000th and 1001st term will be equivalent to the sum of the 1012th and (1012+1)st term, which is what the problem asks for!

The code to do this is elementary. I accomplished it with a mere 5 lines of C# code. Can you do better?