Counting arithmetic formulas

Abstract

An arithmetic formula is an expression involving only the constant $1$, and the binary operations of addition and multiplication, with multiplication by $1$ not allowed. We obtain an asymptotic formula for the number of arithmetic formulas evaluating to $n$ as $n$ goes to infinity, solving a conjecture of E. K. Gnang and D. Zeilberger. We give also an asymptotic formula for the number of arithmetic formulas evaluating to $n$ and using exactly $k$ multiplications. Finally we analyze three specific encodings for producing arithmetic formulas. For almost all integers $n$, we compare the lengths of the arithmetic formulas for $n$ that each encoding produces with the length of the shortest formula for $n$ (which we estimate from below). We briefly discuss the time-space tradeoff offered by each.