Harold R. Parks, Dean C. Wills
Efforts have been made to extend Cassini's identity (also known as Simson's identity) to the k-step or k-bonacci numbers for decades. These efforts have lacked both completeness of result and simplicity of proof, and this question remains open and relevant. In this note, we offer a definitive solution as well as the generalization of both Catalan's and Vajda's identities.
Harold R. Parks, Dean C. Wills
The egg-drop experiment introduced by Konhauser, Velleman, and Wagon, later generalized by Boardman, is further generalized to two additional types. The three separate types of egg-drop experiment under consideration are examined in the context of binary decision trees. It is shown that all three types of egg-drop experiment are binary decision problems that can be solved efficiently using a non-redundant algorithm -- a class of algorithms introduced here. The preceding theoretical results are applied to the three types of egg-drop experiment to compute, for each, the maximum height of a building that can be dealt with using a given number of egg-droppings.
Harold R. Parks, Dean C. Wills
We give a combinatorial proof of a formula giving the partial sums of the $k$-bonacci sequence as alternating sums of powers of two multiplied by binomial coefficients. As a corollary we obtain a formula for the $k$-bonacci numbers.