English

Block occurrences in the binary expansion

Number Theory 2023-09-04 v1

Abstract

The binary sum-of-digits function s\mathsf{s} returns the number of ones in the binary expansion of a nonnegative integer. Cusick's Hamming weight conjecture states that, for all integers t0t\geq 0, the set of nonnegative integers nn such that s(n+t)s(n)\mathsf{s}(n+t)\geq \mathsf{s}(n) has asymptotic density strictly larger than 1/21/2. We are concerned with the block-additive function r\mathsf{r} returning the number of (overlapping) occurrences of the block 11\mathtt{11} in the binary expansion of nn. The main result of this paper is a central limit-type theorem for the difference r(n+t)r(n)\mathsf{r}(n+t)-\mathsf{r}(n): the corresponding probability function is uniformly close to a Gaussian, where the uniform error tends to 00 as the number of blocks of ones in the binary expansion of tt tends to \infty.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2309.00142,
  title  = {Block occurrences in the binary expansion},
  author = {Bartosz Sobolewski and Lukas Spiegelhofer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.00142},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

19 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-28T12:09:50.164Z