Problem #1: Valleys in decreasing functions
Let f : nat -> nat
be a decreasing function. Here, we mean decreasing in the non-strict sense (and indeed, no strictly decreasing functions nat -> nat
exist).
Your typical decreasing function
Classically, we can prove that f
must eventually be constant, i.e. there is a position after which the value of f
never changes. Unfortunately, this cannot be proven constructively (we will revisit this in Problem #2), but we can prove something weaker. By an n
-valley, we will mean a sequence of n+1
consecutive points that have the same value. For example, in the above figure, there is a 3
-valley at position x=4
.
Problem: Show that for any decreasing f
and natural number n
, there is an n
-valley somewhere in f
.