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yeah. i have some homework on the "Hailstone Sequence" that i'm learning about in math class. there are two questions on my homework that i'm having trouble answering.
(Q) What is the largest stretch of numbers before a Hailstone Sequence enters a loop?
(A) I don't really know. Should i just say infinite? or is that incorrect? should i just say the highest number i can think of or is there really a number that can answer this question?

(Q) What is the highest number reached by a hailstone sequence?
(A) Same thing. Is there really a number that can answer this question? or should i just say the highest number i can think of?

yeah. i really need help on this cause i really don't know the answer . if you can help me, that'd be greatly appreciated. thanks.

jon_jinn wrote:yeah. i have some homework on the "Hailstone Sequence" that i'm learning about in math class. there are two questions on my homework that i'm having trouble answering.
(Q) What is the largest stretch of numbers before a Hailstone Sequence enters a loop?
(A) I don't really know. Should i just say infinite? or is that incorrect? should i just say the highest number i can think of or is there really a number that can answer this question?

(Q) What is the highest number reached by a hailstone sequence?
(A) Same thing. Is there really a number that can answer this question? or should i just say the highest number i can think of?

yeah. i really need help on this cause i really don't know the answer . if you can help me, that'd be greatly appreciated. thanks.

I'm not sure of the context of this assignment, but unless your teacher is some kind of sadist, I don't think they expect you to be able to solve this problem yourself. Instead, you should approach it as a research question. The reason for this is that while the Hailstone (Collatz) problem is easy to describe is in fact very difficult to analyze. In particular, your first problem is currently unanswerable. Collatz's conjecture states that all such sequences will converge to a repeating loop]http://mathworld.wolfram.com/CollatzProblem.html[/url]