English

An entropic analogue of the MMS conjecture

Combinatorics 2026-06-29 v1

Abstract

Let P={x1,,xn}P=\{x_1,\ldots,x_n\} be a multiset consisting of n2n\ge 2 real numbers such that i=1nxi=0\sum_{i=1}^{n}x_i=0 and i=1nxi>0\sum_{i=1}^{n}|x_i|>0, and let k<nk <n be a positive integer. We sample kk elements from PP without replacement and set XPX_P be the sum of the elements in our sample. It is shown that the Shannon entropy of XPX_P satisfies H(XP)H(Ber(k/n)), \mathbf{H}(X_P) \ge \mathbf{H}(\text{Ber}(k/n)) \, , where Ber(k/n)\text{Ber}(k/n) is a Bernoulli random variable of mean k/nk/n. The result is sharp, and may be seen as an entropic analogue of the Manickam-Mikl\'os-Singhi (MMS) conjecture.

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Cite

@article{arxiv.2606.30486,
  title  = {An entropic analogue of the MMS conjecture},
  author = {Jianhang Ai and Ondřej Kuželka and Christos Pelekis},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.30486},
  year   = {2026}
}

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12 pages