Call a set of integers spacy if it contains no more than one out of any three consecutive integers. How many subsets of including the empty set, are spacy?
Problem 90
Official solution
Let denote the number of spacy subsets of . We have .
The spacy subsets of can be divided into two groups:
those not containing . Clearly .
those containing . We have , since removing from any set in produces a spacy set with all elements at most equal to and each such spacy set can be constructed from exactly one spacy set in .
Hence,
From this recursion, we find that
1
2
3
4
6
9
13
19
28
41
60
88
129
And so the answer is .