On the growth of the counting function of Stanley sequences (Q629195)

A set of nonnegative integers is called \(3\)-free if it contains no \(3\)-term arithmetic progression. Given a finite \(3\)-free set \(A=\{a_1<\dots<a_t\}\), the Stanley sequence generated by \(A\) is the infinite sequence \(S(A)=\{a_1,a_2,a_3,\dots\}\) defined by the following recursion. If \(k\geq t\) and \(a_1<\dots<a_k\) have been defined, let \(a_{k+1}\) be the smallest integer \(a>a_k\) such that \(\{a_1,\dots,a_k\}\cup \{a\}\) is \(3\)-free. The author proves that for any \(\varepsilon>0\) and \(x\geq x_0(\varepsilon,A)\), \[ S(A,x)\geq (\sqrt{2}-\varepsilon)\sqrt{x}, \] where \(S(A,x)=|\{s\in S(A)\mid s\leq x\}|\).