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

At least 1 year old · documented by

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 S⊂ZS\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,b−a is odd,⌊(ab+b−a)/4⌋ab+b−a,b−a is even,dc(S)={14,b−a is odd,⌈(ab+a+b)/4⌉ab+a+b,b−a 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.

References

Primary source

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

Progress summary

Never refreshed

Nothing recorded yet. Refresh searches the literature and the public web for attempts on this problem, and writes the first summary here.

Solutions 0

No solutions have been posted yet.