ON ASYMPTOTIC BASES WHICH HAVE DISTINCT SUBSET SUMS

Abstract

AbstractLet 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.