Alternating Parity

Odd, even, odd, even — nobody sits next to their own kind.

Every pair of neighboring digits must differ in parity, all the way through — like 12, 123 or 505050. Two digits minimum; a lone digit has nothing to alternate with.

35,145
Exact matches
1 in 28
Odds
3.51%
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97 EP
Base EP

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Its probability structure is textbook-clean: the first digit is any of 9 nonzero choices, and every digit after that has exactly 5 options — the five digits of the opposite parity. Each extra digit cuts the odds exactly in half. So the k-digit count is always 9×5^(k−1): two-digit numbers hit it exactly half the time (45/90), six-digit ones 28,125/900,000 — precisely 1/32.

There are 35,145 across the whole range, about 3.5% — second only to Zigzag among the sequence features. Length is its only enemy: ubiquitous among two-digit numbers, roughly three-in-a-hundred among six-digit ones.

Trivia: every Fully Ascending and Fully Descending number hits Alternating Parity automatically — a step of exactly 1 always flips parity. The mirror brothers 123456 and 987654 are also the two tidiest alternating queues in the range.

Smallest examples

Notable examples

123,456 Fully Ascending, Straight and Alternating Parity at once — consecutive digits and parity alternation are two faces of the same thing.
101,010 The minimal alternation: 1-0-1-0-1-0 — also a periodic number.

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