Consider sequences of the form such that each term is either 0 or 1. For each such sequence , we can produce a sequence , where . How many sequences are there that can be produced by more than one distinct sequence ?
Solution
Let the two sequences be and . Then, observe that given , if and , then (since will uniquely determine the remaining elements in and ). Thus, and must start with and , respectively (without loss of generality). Note that is either 1 (in which case ) or 2 (in which case ). Moreover, must be the same as (and the same for ) for the sequences to generate the same . We can then pick . Observe, that the last elements also have to be for and for . Thus, the answer is nonzero only for sequence lengths of , in which case, our answer is , where the length is (since we have two choices for every third element). Here, since , the answer is .
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