Dead ends in square-free digit walks
Abstract
We study "dead ends" in square-free digit walks: square-free integers such that, in base , every one-digit extension is non-square-free. In base , the stochastic independence model of Miller et al. suggests that infinite square-free walks occur with probability near , corresponding to an asymptotic dead-end density of . We prove that the true asymptotic dead-end density satisfies roughly a factor of smaller than the prediction. For every base , 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.
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