login

Year-end appeal: Please make a donation to the OEIS Foundation to support ongoing development and maintenance of the OEIS. We are now in our 61st year, we have over 378,000 sequences, and we’ve reached 11,000 citations (which often say “discovered thanks to the OEIS”).

A006777
Number of n-step spirals on hexagonal lattice.
(Formerly M1098)
2
1, 2, 4, 8, 14, 26, 43, 74, 120, 197, 311, 495, 768, 1189, 1811, 2748, 4116, 6136, 9058, 13299, 19370, 28069, 40399, 57856, 82374, 116736, 164574, 231007, 322749, 449089, 622263, 858935, 1181048, 1618209, 2209299, 3006273, 4077285, 5512650, 7430440, 9986147
OFFSET
1,2
COMMENTS
The hexagonal lattice is the familiar 2-dimensional lattice in which each point has 6 neighbors. This is sometimes called the triangular lattice.
Corresponds to the Model II single spiral of Table 3 in Szekeres and Guttmann. In Model II every step of the walk consists of either continuing in the current direction or turning clockwise by 60 degrees (i.e., giving an obtuse angle on the path). Roughly speaking, a "single spiral" is a self-avoiding clockwise walk that cannot get stuck in a dead end. More precisely, let u(i) denote the length of the successive straight-line segment of the walk with u(0)=0. Then a walk with k straight line segments (note k <= n), is a single spiral if u(i-4) + u(i-3) < u(i-1) + u(i) for 4 <= i <= k. - Sean A. Irvine, Apr 05 2022
REFERENCES
N. J. A. Sloane and Simon Plouffe, The Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, Academic Press, 1995 (includes this sequence).
LINKS
Sean A. Irvine, Java program (github).
G. Szekeres and A. J. Guttmann, Spiral self-avoiding walks on the triangular lattice, J. Phys. A 20 (1987), 481-493.
CROSSREFS
Sequence in context: A298880 A208483 A284735 * A036609 A027557 A120545
KEYWORD
nonn
EXTENSIONS
More terms from Sean A. Irvine, Apr 04 2022
STATUS
approved