English

Dead ends in square-free digit walks

Combinatorics 2026-02-09 v2 Number Theory Probability

Abstract

We study "dead ends" in square-free digit walks: square-free integers NN such that, in base bb, every one-digit extension bN+dbN+d is non-square-free. In base 1010, the stochastic independence model of Miller et al. suggests that infinite square-free walks occur with probability near 11, corresponding to an asymptotic dead-end density of 5.218×105\approx 5.218\times 10^{-5}. We prove that the true asymptotic dead-end density satisfies cdead1.317×109, c_{\mathrm{dead}} \approx 1.317\times 10^{-9}, roughly a factor of 4×104\sim 4\times 10^4 smaller than the prediction. For every base b2b\geq 2, we prove that dead-end densities exist and are given by a closed-form expression (as a finite alternating sum of Euler products). The argument is fully formalized in Lean/Mathlib, and was produced automatically by AxiomProver from a natural-language statement of the problem.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.05095,
  title  = {Dead ends in square-free digit walks},
  author = {Evan Chen and Chris Cummins and Ben Eltschig and Dejan Grubisic and Leopold Haller and Letong Hong and Andranik Kurghinyan and Kenny Lau and Hugh Leather and Seewoo Lee and Aram Markosyan and Ken Ono and Manooshree Patel and Gaurang Pendharkar and Vedant Rathi and Alex Schneidman and Volker Seeker and Shubho Sengupta and Ishan Sinha and Jimmy Xin and Jujian Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.05095},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

After we posted the first version on arXiv, we learned from K. Soundararajan that the result in this paper was previously obtained by Mirsky in 1947. We mistakenly assumed that the 2024 paper of Miller et al. represented the status of this problem. Their paper makes no reference to Mirsky; his work seems to have been forgotten. This manuscript will not be submitted for journal publication

R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:36:53.494Z