On the Erdos Discrepancy Problem
Abstract
According to the Erd\H{o}s discrepancy conjecture, for any infinite sequence, there exists a homogeneous arithmetic progression of unbounded discrepancy. In other words, for any sequence and a discrepancy , there exist integers and such that . This is an -year-old open problem and recent development proved that this conjecture is true for discrepancies up to . Paul Erd\H{o}s also conjectured that this property of unbounded discrepancy even holds for the restricted case of completely multiplicative sequences (CMSs), namely sequences where for any . The longest CMS with discrepancy has been proven to be of size . In this paper, we prove that any completely multiplicative sequence of size or more has discrepancy at least , proving the Erd\H{o}s discrepancy conjecture for CMSs of discrepancies up to . In addition, we prove that this bound is tight and increases the size of the longest known sequence of discrepancy from to . Finally, we provide inductive construction rules as well as streamlining methods to improve the lower bounds for sequences of higher discrepancies.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1407.2510,
title = {On the Erdos Discrepancy Problem},
author = {Ronan Le Bras and Carla P. Gomes and Bart Selman},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1407.2510},
year = {2014}
}
Comments
8 pages; 0 figure; Submitted on April 14, 2014 to the 20th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming