Internal structure of addition chains: well-ordering

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Abstract: An addition chain for n is defined to be a sequence (a0,a1,ldots,ar) such that a0=1, ar=n, and, for any 1lekler, there exist 0lei,j<k such that ak=ai+aj; the number r is called the length of the addition chain. The shortest length among addition chains for n, called the addition chain length of n, is denoted ell(n). The number ell(n) is always at least log2n; in this paper we consider the difference deltaell(n):=ell(n)log2n, which we call the addition chain defect. First we use this notion to show that for any n, there exists K such that for any kgeK, we have ell(2kn)=ell(2Kn)+(kK). The main result is that the set of values of deltaell is a well-ordered subset of [0,infty), with order type omegaomega. The results obtained here are analogous to the results for integer complexity obtained in [1] and [3]. We also prove similar well-ordering results for restricted forms of addition chain length, such as star chain length and Hansen chain length.





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