Would you count it manually?

How many subsets of { 1 , 2 , 3 , , 49 , 50 } \left\{ {1,2,3, \ldots ,49,50} \right\} don't contain any consecutive integers?


The answer is 32951280099.

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1 solution

Daniel Branscombe
Jul 28, 2015

let A(n) be the number of subsets of {1,2,3,...,n} which don't contain any consecutive integers.

A(0)=1 as it is simply the empty set A(1)=2 as it is all subsets namely {},{1}

now for n>=2, consider two instances for a given subset

1) n is in the subset, if this is the case then n-1 can not be in the subset and any valid subset of {1,2,...,n-2} will work for the remaining elements of the subset, thus there are A(n-2) valid subsets which contain n.

2) n is not in the subset, then this is simply the case for {1,2,...,n-1} which is simply A(n-1)

Thus A(n)=A(n-2)+A(n-1) with A(0)=1 and A(1)=2 or in other words it is simply a shifted Fibonacci sequence and the usual methods can be used to complete A(50)

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