I came across an interesting article in Quanta Magazine, dated November 16th 2023, that mentions Somos sequences that I'd not heard of before. To quote from the article:
A Somos-k sequence starts with the digit or digits 1, k of them. Each new term of a Somos-k sequence is defined by pairing off previous terms, multiplying each pair together, adding up the pairs, and then dividing by the term k positions back in the sequence.
The sequences aren’t very interesting if k equals 1, 2 or 3 — they are just a series of repeating ones. But for k = 4, 5, 6 or 7 the sequences have a weird property. Even though there is a lot of division involved, fractions don’t appear.
Figure 1 shows an excerpt from the article that illustrates how the Somos-5 series is generated.
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Figure 1 |
It's easy enough to write some SageMath code to generate the Somos-5 and here are the initial terms and, as can be seen, the terms get very large very quickly.
A006721 | Somos-5 sequence: a(n) = (a(n-1) * a(n-4) + a(n-2) * a(n-3)) / a(n-5), with a(0) = a(1) = a(2) = a(3) = a(4) = 1. |
A006720 | Somos-4 sequence: a(0)=a(1)=a(2)=a(3)=1; for n >= 4, a(n) = (a(n-1) * a(n-3) + a(n-2)^2) / a(n-4). |
A006722 | Somos-6 sequence: a(n) = (a(n-1) * a(n-5) + a(n-2) * a(n-4) + a(n-3)^2) / a(n-6), a(0) = ... = a(5) = 1. |
A006723 | Somos-7 sequence: a(n) = (a(n-1) * a(n-6) + a(n-2) * a(n-5) + a(n-3) * a(n-4)) / a(n-7), a(0) = ... = a(6) = 1. |
The initial members are:
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