Infinite Families of Partitions into MSTD Subsets

Hung Viet Chu, Noah Luntzlara, Steven J. Miller, Lily Shao

Published 2018-08-16Version 1

A set $A$ is MSTD (more-sum-than-difference) if $|A+A|>|A-A|$. Though MSTD sets are rare, Martin and O'Bryant proved that there exists a positive constant lower bound for the proportion of MSTD subsets of $\{1,2,\ldots ,r\}$ as $r\rightarrow\infty$. Asada et al. [AMMS] showed that there exists a positive constant lower bound for the proportion of decompositions of $\{1,2,\ldots,r\}$ into two MSTD subsets as $r\rightarrow\infty$, which implies the result of Martin and O'Bryant. However, the method is probabilistic and does not give explicit decompositions. Continuing this work, we provide an efficient method to partition $\{1,2,\ldots,r\}$ (for $r$ sufficiently large) into $k \ge 2$ MSTD subsets, positively answering a question raised in [AMMS] as to whether or not this is possible for all such $k$. Next, let $R$ be the smallest integer such that for all $r\ge R$, $\{1,2,\ldots,r\}$ can be $k$-decomposed into MSTD subsets, while $\{1,2,\ldots,R-1\}$ cannot be $k$-decomposed into MSTD subsets. We establish rough lower and upper bounds for $R$ and the gap between the two bounds grows linearly with $k$. Lastly, we provide a sufficient condition on when there exists a constant lower bound for the proportion of decompositions of $\{1,2,\ldots,r\}$ into $k$ MSTD subsets as $r\rightarrow \infty$. This condition offers an alternative proof of Theorem 1.4 in [AMMS] and can be a promising approach to generalize the