Collatz Conjecture

Welcome to Collatz Conjecture on Exercism's C++ Track. If you need help running the tests or submitting your code, check out HELP.md.

Instructions

The Collatz Conjecture or 3x+1 problem can be summarized as follows:

Take any positive integer n. If n is even, divide n by 2 to get n / 2. If n is odd, multiply n by 3 and add 1 to get 3n + 1. Repeat the process indefinitely. The conjecture states that no matter which number you start with, you will always reach 1 eventually.

Given a number n, return the number of steps required to reach 1.

Examples

Starting with n = 12, the steps would be as follows:

1. 12
2. 6
3. 3
4. 10
5. 5
6. 16
7. 8
8. 4
9. 2
10. 1

Resulting in 9 steps. So for input n = 12, the return value would be 9.

Source

Created by

• @marvelou-s

Contributed to by

• @elyashiv
• @KevinWMatthews
• @patricksjackson

Based on

An unsolved problem in mathematics named after mathematician Lothar Collatz - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3x_%2B_1_problem