# What's the general term in this sequence?

$4, 2, 4, 2, 4, 6, 2, 6,$ then repeat.

I'm having difficulty coming up with the general term. This is part of a program I'm writing, so a recursive definition would be fine. I'd prefer to keep track of at most one auxiliary variable though.

EDIT

So here's a solution for the different sequence $2,4,2,4,2,4,2,4,\ldots$ that I sort of want to parallel:

$a_0=2$ and $a_{i+1}=a_i+(-1)^i2$

Implemented in code, I would export the term $(-1)^i$ to another variable and at each iteration multiply it by $-1$.

• I'm not a programmer so feel free to tell me if this is a stupid suggestion, but I would have thought you could give a lookup table for the first eight values and then $a(n)=a(n\,{\rm mod}\,8)$ for the rest. – David Feb 26 '14 at 6:20
• It's cheap to provide the space for the lookup table, but constant look-ups and modular arithmetic isn't the best thing to do. It also lacks a certain 'beauty'. I just feel like there has to be a simple pattern to this sequence. – Robert Wolfe Feb 26 '14 at 6:27
• @Bryan: Why is it not the best thing to do? (By the way, as $8$ is a power of two, $n \bmod 8$ is just n & 7 in code (this means zeroing out all but the last three bits); it gets compiled to a single bitwise instruction AFAIK.) – ShreevatsaR Feb 26 '14 at 7:30

\eqalign{a_n &= {\frac {15}{4}}+ \left( 1-\dfrac{\sqrt {2}}{4} \right) \cos \left( \pi \,n/4 \right) + \left( 1+\dfrac{\sqrt {2}}{4} \right) \cos \left( 3\pi \,n/4 \right) +\dfrac{1}{4}\,\cos \left( \pi \,n \right) \cr&+ \left( -1+\dfrac{\sqrt {2}}{4} \right) \sin \left( \pi \,n /4\right) +\dfrac12\,\sin \left( \pi \,n/2 \right) + \left( 1+\dfrac{\sqrt {2}}{4} \right) \sin \left( 3\,\pi \,n/4 \right) \cr} will do if you want something like that. But the solution of taking $n \mod 8$ is much better practically.