Real subset sums and posets with an involution

In this paper, we carry out in an abstract order context some real subset combinatorial problems. Specifically, let [Formula: see text] be a finite poset, where [Formula: see text] is an order-reversing and involutive map such that [Formula: see text] for each [Formula: see text]. Let [Formula: see text] be the Boolean lattice with two elements and [Formula: see text] the family of all the order-preserving 2-valued maps [Formula: see text] such that [Formula: see text] if [Formula: see text] for all [Formula: see text]. In this paper, we build a family [Formula: see text] of particular subsets of [Formula: see text], that we call [Formula: see text]-bases on [Formula: see text], and we determine a bijection between the family [Formula: see text] and the family [Formula: see text]. In such a bijection, a [Formula: see text]-basis [Formula: see text] on [Formula: see text] corresponds to a map [Formula: see text] whose restriction of [Formula: see text] to [Formula: see text] is the smallest 2-valued partial map on [Formula: see text] which has [Formula: see text] as its unique extension in [Formula: see text]. Next we show how each [Formula: see text]-basis on [Formula: see text] becomes, in a particular context, a sub-system of a larger system of linear inequalities, whose compatibility implies the compatibility of the whole system.

Anticoncentration versus the Number of Subset Sums

Let w=(w_1,...,w_n) be a vector from R^n. We show that for any n^{-2}<=eps<=1, if the number of zero-one vectors xi such that <xi,w>=tau is at least 2^{-eps*n}*2^n for some tau, then the number of values <xi,w> is at most 2^{O(eps^{1/2}n)} where xi ranges over all zero-one vectors. This exponentially improves the eps dependence in a recent result of Nederlof, Pawlewicz, Swennenhuis, and Węgrzycki and leads to a similar improvement in the parameterized (by the number of bins) runtime of bin packing.

ON ASYMPTOTIC BASES WHICH HAVE DISTINCT SUBSET SUMS

Let k and l be positive integers satisfying $k \ge 2, l \ge 1$ . A set $\mathcal {A}$ of positive integers is an asymptotic basis of order k if every large enough positive integer can be represented as the sum of k terms from $\mathcal {A}$ . About 35 years ago, P. Erdős asked: does there exist an asymptotic basis of order k where all the subset sums with at most l terms are pairwise distinct with the exception of a finite number of cases as long as $l \le k - 1$ ? We use probabilistic tools to prove the existence of an asymptotic basis of order $2k+1$ for which all the sums of at most k elements are pairwise distinct except for ‘small’ numbers.