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A few mathematical questions have come up from the question "The prime ant 🐜" on the Programming Puzzles & Code Golf Stack Exchange.

Here is how the prime ant is defined:

Initially, we have an infinite array A containing all the integers >= 2 : [2,3,4,5,6,.. ] Let p be the position of the ant on the array. Initially, p = 0 (array is 0-indexed) Each turn, the ant will move as follows: if A[p] is prime, the ant moves to the next position : p ← p+1

is prime, the ant moves to the next position : else, if A[p] is a composite number, let q be its smaller divisor > 1. We divide A[p] by q , and we add q to A[p-1] . The ant moves to the previous position: p ← p-1 Here are the first moves for the ant: 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 ... ^ 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 ... ^ 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 ... ^ 2 5 2 5 6 7 8 9 ... ^ 2 5 2 5 6 7 8 9 ... ^ 2 5 2 5 6 7 8 9 ... ^ 2 5 2 5 6 7 8 9 ... ^ 2 5 2 7 3 7 8 9 ... ^

Questions relate to proving the sequence is well-defined:

I wonder whether the sequence is well-defined for arbitrarily large n (or whether the composite case could ever push the ant to the left of the initial 2). – Martin Ender♦ Oct 9 at 6:59

Whether all prime values appear:

@MartinEnder Another open question is whether a prime > 7 can eventually be left behind for good. – Arnauld Oct 9 at 10:39

And what the asymptotic growth looks like:

@Arnauld I'm curious how the ant's position grows with respect to the number of moves. My guess is logarithmic. – kamoroso94 Oct 9 at 12:58

I have added this sequence to the On-Line Encylopedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS) as sequence A293689. Here's what the plot of the first 10000 terms looks like: