Partitions of finite nonnegative integer sets with identical representation functions (Q6100759)

Let \(\mathbb{N}\) denote the set of all nonnegative integers. For \(T\subseteq \mathbb{N}\) and \(n\in \mathbb{N}\), let \(R_T(n)\) be the number of solutions of \(n=t_1+t_2\), \(t_1, t_2\in T\), \(t_1<t_2\). Let \(A\) be the set of all nonnegative integers which contain an even number of digit \(1\) in their binary representations and \(B=\mathbb{N}\setminus A\). For a positive integer \(\ell\), let \(A_{\ell} =A\cap [0, 2^\ell -1]\) and \(B_{\ell} =B\cap [0, 2^\ell -1]\). \textit{Y.-G. Chen} and \textit{V. F. Lev} [Integers 16, Paper A36, 4 p. (2016; Zbl 1404.11013)] posed the following problem (the following statement is different from the original problem slightly but they are equivalent): Let \(m,r\) be two integers with \(m\ge 2\) and \(r\ge 0\), and let \(C\cup D=\{ 0,1,\dots , m\} \) and \(C\cap D=\{ r\}\). Suppose that \(R_C(n)=R_D(n)\) for all nonnegative integers \(n\). Must there exist an integer \(\ell \ge 1\) such that \(r=2^{2\ell}-1\), \(m=2^{2\ell +1}-2\), \(C=A_{2\ell}\cup (2^{2\ell}-1+B_{2\ell}\) and \(D=B_{2\ell}\cup (2^{2\ell}-1+A_{2\ell}\)? \textit{S. Z. Kiss} and \textit{C. Sándor} [Discrete Math. 340, No. 6, 1154--1161 (2017; Zbl 1421.11091)] answered this problem affirmatively. In this paper, the authors extend the above problem to the case \(C\cap D=\{ r_1, r_2\}\) and prove the following result: Theorem. Let \(m\ge 3\) be an integer. Suppose that \(C\cup D=\{ 0,1,\dots , m\} \) and \(C\cap D=\{ r_1, r_2\}\) with \(0\in C\), \(r_1<r_2\) and \(2\mid r_1\). Then \(R_C(n)=R_D(n)\) for all nonnegative integers \(n\) if and only if there exists a positive integer \(\ell\) such that \(m=2^{2\ell +2}-3\), \(r_1=2^{2\ell +1}-2\), \(r_2=2^{2\ell +1}-1\) and \[ C=A_{2\ell +1}\cup (2^{2\ell +1}-2+B_{2\ell+1}),\quad D=B_{2\ell+1}\cup (2^{2\ell}-2+A_{2\ell+1}). \] For \(r_1\) being odd, the authors conjecture that \(R_C(n)=R_D(n)\) for all nonnegative integers \(n\) if and only if there exists a positive integer \(\ell\) such that \(m=2^{2\ell +2}-3\), \(r_1=2^{2\ell }-1\), \(r_2=2^{2\ell +1}+2^{2\ell }-2\) and \[ C=A_{2\ell }\cup (2^{2\ell }-1+B_{2\ell})\cup (2^{2\ell +1}-1+(B_{2\ell} \cup (2^{2\ell }-1+A_{2\ell}))), \] \[ D=B_{2\ell }\cup (2^{2\ell }-1+A_{2\ell})\cup (2^{2\ell +1}-1+(A_{2\ell} \cup (2^{2\ell }-1+B_{2\ell}))). \]