C Programming Help (Collatz Conjecture) Hey so explaining everthing: I have a sequence following the simple rule:

- If the current term is even: the next term is half the current term.

- If the current term is odd: the next term is three times the current term, plus 1.

we continue this until we reach one and count each term used.

For example: For he number 17, we have:

17 52 26 13 40 20 10 5 16 8 4 2 1

Hence, the count is 13.

What I specifically need assistance with is that I need to find the smallest starting value (number) which has a count over 1234.

ie:

- 1 has count 1

- 2 has count 2

- 3 has count 8

- 6 has count 9

- 7 has count 17

- 9 has count 20

- 18 has count 21

- 25 has count 24

- 27 has count 112

- 54 has count 113

- 73 has count 116

- 97 has count 119

This is the code I have which I think works but takes extremely long to process. How can I do this much more quickly?

#include

int main (void) {

unsigned long long int num1 = 1; while (num1 <= 99999999999999999) { unsigned long long int num = num1; int i = 0; int count = 1; while (num != 1) { if (num % 2 == 0) { num = (num/2); // printf("%d ", num); count++; } else { num = ((num*3) + 1); // printf("%d ", num); count++; } i++; } if (count > 1234) { printf("%llu ", num1); break; }

num1++; } return 0; }