The packing and covering density conjecture for symmetric four-element sets

From papers

Let a<ba<b be coprime positive integers, and let

S={0,a,b,a+b}.S=\{0,a,b,a+b\}.

For a finite set SZS\subset\mathbb{Z}, write dp(S)d_p(S) for its packing density and dc(S)d_c(S) for its covering density. The packing and covering density conjecture.

dp(S)={14,ba is odd,(ab+ba)/4ab+ba,ba is even,dc(S)={14,ba is odd,(ab+a+b)/4ab+a+b,ba is even.d_p(S)=\begin{cases}\frac{1}{4},&b-a\text{ is odd},\\[2pt]\frac{\lfloor(ab+b-a)/4\rfloor}{ab+b-a},&b-a\text{ is even},\end{cases} \qquad d_c(S)=\begin{cases}\frac{1}{4},&b-a\text{ is odd},\\[2pt]\frac{\lceil(ab+a+b)/4\rceil}{ab+a+b},&b-a\text{ is even}. \end{cases}

The statement gives the proposed exact packing and covering densities for symmetric four-element sets; the surrounding discussion identifies the related packing conjecture of Liu and Zhu as open and presents this covering counterpart as connected to a Ramsey-theoretic problem. The supplied source does not establish whether this combined statement has since been resolved.

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Sources & referencesView supporting material

Primary source

Alexander Natalchenko and Arsenii Sagdeev, “Packing Density of Sets With Only Two Nonmixed Gaps”, arXiv:2407.01101 (2025).

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