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Showerthought: I bet my friend $20 that the 3x+1 "Collatz" thing was fake internet math, and then I spent a weekend proving myself wrong
Last month my buddy Dan kept going on about this number game where you take any number, halve it if it's even, and triple it plus one if it's odd, and he claimed every number eventually lands on 1. I laughed at him. Sounded like the kind of thing a guy makes up after two beers. So we bet $20 and I opened a spreadsheet on a Tuesday night to kill it fast.
Three hours later I was still typing numbers by hand and my coffee had gone cold. I tried 27 like he said. That one takes 111 steps before it hits 1, and at one point it climbs all the way past 9,000. I sat there watching the column grow and muttering at my screen. It never broke. Every starting number I threw at it, from 1 to a few thousand, bounced around like a pinball and then fell into the same little loop at the bottom: 4, 2, 1, 4, 2, 1.
The kicker is nobody has ever proven it always works. Mathematicians have checked numbers up to some huge count and it holds, but no real proof exists. Dan was right and I handed him a $20 the next Saturday.
So now I want to know: has anyone here ever run a number like 27 out of spite and lost a whole evening to it? Drop your worst offender below.
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