I'd like to see this for smaller n, to see if there are motifs or patterns, which can be used to implement memoisation like Hashlife (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife), or to reveal new formulas for exploring Collatz sequences with.
Good idea. Although, from the little exploration I did with examples for small n, given the low stopping times, the behaviour was very boring. Nothing necessarily interesting. But then again, I didn't explore it exhaustively.
> Good idea. Although, from the little exploration I did with examples for small n, given the low stopping times, the behaviour was very boring. Nothing necessarily interesting. But then again, I didn't explore it exhaustively.
Warning: huge amounts of compute time have been spent trying to find a counter example to this conjecture, which almost everyone believes is true. I kept my office warm this way one winter. It has been described as a way to turn pure Platonic mathematics into heat.
Always interesting to try to visualize something though.
Ps -- I implemented hashlife one time. Still amazed someone came up with that algorithm