The minimum overlap problem revisited

Understand

For a given partition of (1, 2, ..., 2n) into two disjoint subsets A and B with n elements in each, consider the maximum number of times any integer occurs as the difference between an element of A and an element of B.

• The minimum value of this maximum (over all partitions) is denoted by M(n).
• By a result of Swinnerton-Dyer, one way to estimate lim M(n)/n from above is to give step functions that describe the density of A, say, throughout the interval [1, 2n] for a large n rather than looking for explicit partitions.
• A step function that improves the upper bound from 0.382002...