Most of the answers so far have been along the general lines of 'Why hard problems are important', rather than 'Why the Collatz conjecture is important'; I will try to address the latter.
I think the basic question being touched on is:
In what ways does the prime factorization of $a$ affect the prime factorization of $a+1$?
Of course, one can always multiply out the prime factorization, add one, and then factor again, but this throws away the information of the prime factorization of $a$. Note that this question is also meaningful in other UFDs, like $\mathbb{C}[x]$.
It seems very hard to come up with answers to this question that don't fall under the heading of 'immediate', such as distinct primes in each factorization. This seems to be in part because a small change in the prime factorization for $a$ (multiplication by a prime, say) can have a huge change in the prime factorization for $a+1$ (totally distinct prime support perhaps). Therefore, it is tempting to regard the act of adding 1 as an essentially-random shuffling of the prime factorization.
The most striking thing about the Collatz conjecture is that it seems to be making a deep statement about a subtle relation between the prime factorizations of $a$ and $a+1$. Note that the Collatz iteration consists of three steps; two of which are 'small' in terms of the prime factorization, and the other of which is adding one:
- multiplying by 3 has a small effect on the factorization.
- adding 1 has a (possibly) huge effect on the factorization.
- factoring out a power of 2 has a small effect on the factorization (in that it doesn't change the other prime powers in the factorization).
So, the Collatz conjecture seems to say that there is some sort of abstract quantity like 'energy' which cannot be arbitrarily increased by adding 1. That is, no matter where you start, and no matter where this weird prime-shuffling action of adding 1 takes you, eventually the act of pulling out 2s takes enough energy out of the system so that you reach 1. I think it is for reasons like this that mathematicians suspect that a solution of the Collatz conjecture will open new horizons and develop new and important techniques in number theory.
Best Answer
You shouldn't expect this to be true. Here is a nonrigorous argument. Let $n_k$ be the sequence of odd numbers you obtain. So (heuristically), with probability $1/2$, we have $n_{k+1} = (5n_k+1)/2$, with probability $1/4$, we have $n_{k+1} = (5 n_k+1)/4$, with probability $1/8$, we have $n_{k+1} = (5 n_k+1)/8$ and so forth. Setting $x_k = \log n_k$, we approximately have $x_{k+1} \approx x_k + \log 5 - \log 2$ with probability $1/2$, $x_{k+1} \approx x_k + \log 5 - 2 \log 2$ with probability $1/4$, $x_{k+1} \approx x_k + \log 5 - 3 \log 2$ with probability $1/8$ and so forth.
So the expected change from $x_{k}$ to $x_{k+1}$ is $$\sum_{j=1}^{\infty} \frac{ \log 5 - j \log 2}{2^j} = \log 5 - 2 \log 2.$$
This is positive! So, heurisitically, I expect this sequence to run off to $\infty$. This is different from the $3n+1$ problem, where $\log 3 - 2 \log 2 <0$, and so you heurisitically expect the sequence to decrease over time.
Here is a numerical example. I started with $n=25$ and generated $25$ odd numbers. Here is a plot of $(k, \log n_k)$, versus the linear growth predicted by my heuristic. Notice that we are up to 4 digit numbers and show no signs of dropping down.