Thue-Morse Sequence

September 30, 2014

Mathematicians are strange people. As an example, I offer the Thue-Morse sequence, which is a binary sequence of 0’s and 1’s that never repeats, obtained by starting with a single 0 and successively appending the binary complement of the sequence. Thus, term 0 of the sequence is (0), term 1 of the sequence is (0 1), term 2 of the sequence is (0 1 1 0), term 3 of the sequence is (0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1), term 4 of the sequence is (0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0), and so on; to calculate term 3 from term 2, we started with term 2 (0 1 1 0), complemented each element of the term (1 0 0 1), then appended the two (0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1). That looks useless to me, but mathematicians have been excited by it since 1851, hence my conclusion that mathematicians are strange people.

Your task is to write a program that generates the nterm of the Thue-Morse sequence. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.

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