The appeal of the problem lies in the irregular behavior of the
successive iterates .
One can measure this behavior using the stopping time, the total stopping
time, and the
expansion factor defined by
if n has a bounded trajectory and if n has a divergent
trajectory.
For example n = 27 requires 70 iterations to arrive at the value 1 and
Table 1 illustrates the concepts defined so far by giving data on the
iterates for selected values of n.