Problem

Source: Romanian JBTST IV 2007, problem 3

Tags: combinatorics proposed, combinatorics



Consider the numbers from $1$ to $16$. The "solitar" game consists in the arbitrary grouping of the numbers in pairs and replacing each pair with the great prime divisor of the sum of the two numbers (i.e from $(1,2); (3,4); (5,6);...;(15,16)$ the numbers which result are $3,7,11,5,19,23,3,31$). The next step follows from the same procedure and the games continues untill we obtain only one number. Which is the maximum numbers with which the game ends.