OFFSET
1,3
COMMENTS
Equivalently, the minimal total number of multiplications and divisions required to compute an n-th power. This is useful for exponentiation on, for example, elliptic curves where division is cheap (as proposed by Morain and Olivos, 1990). Addition-subtraction chains are also defined for negative n. Various bounds and a rules to construct a(n) up to n=42 can be found in Volger (1985).
LINKS
Jens Groth and Victor Shoup, Fast batched asynchronous distributed key generation, Cryptology ePrint Archive, 2023. See p. 31.
F. Morain and J. Olivos, Speeding up the computations on an elliptic curve using addition-subtraction chains, RAIRO Informatique theoretique et application, vol. 24 (1990), pp. 531-543.
Hugo Volger, Some results on addition/subtraction chains, Information Processing Letters, Vol. 20 (1985), pp. 155-160.
EXAMPLE
a(31) = 6 because 31 = 2^5 - 1 and 2^5 can be produced by 5 additions (5 doublings) starting with 1.
CROSSREFS
KEYWORD
nonn,nice
AUTHOR
Steven G. Johnson (stevenj(AT)math.mit.edu), May 01 2007
EXTENSIONS
More terms from T. D. Noe, May 02 2007
STATUS
approved