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Number theory Difficulty 5.6 AIME, harder Prove it Ukraine

Does there exist an increasing sequence of integers 0=a0<a1<a2<0 = a_0 < a_1 < a_2 < \dots, such that the following two conditions are satisfied:

1) every natural number can be written in the form ai+aja_i + a_j for some (maybe equal) indices i,j0i, j \ge 0;

2) an>n216a_n > \frac{n^2}{16} for all natural nn?

Solution

Let (an)(a_n) be the sequence of all natural numbers kk that in binary representation have 11s only on even places or only on odd places. For instance, this sequence contains the numbers that have the following binary representations: 1000010000, 1010010100, 101101, 10001000. Evidently, the first condition is satisfied for this sequence. We will show that the estimate from the second condition is also valid.

Consider all non-negative numbers that are less than 22r2^{2r}, that is the numbers that have no more than 2r2r digits in their binary representations. We count the number of elements of our sequence among these numbers: there are 2r2^r elements that have 00s on all even places and 2r2^r elements that have zeros on all odd places, and zero is the only number that was counted twice. Hence, there are 2r+112^{r+1}-1 elements of our sequence that are less than 22r2^{2r} and so a2r+11=22ra_{2^{r+1}-1} = 2^{2r}.

For any natural number nn we can find an integer rr, such that: 2r+11n<2r+212^{r+1}-1 \le n < 2^{r+2}-1. Then we have: 2r>n4ana2r+11=22r>n2162^r > \frac{n}{4} \Rightarrow a_n \ge a_{2^{r+1}-1} = 2^{2r} > \frac{n^2}{16}, and we are done.

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