Skip to content

Asymptotics of the number partitioning distribution

C. Weiss, M. Holthaus

cond-mat.stat-mecharXiv:cond-mat/0206023

Abstract

The number partitioning problem can be interpreted physically in terms of a thermally isolated non-interacting Bose gas trapped in a one-dimensional harmonic oscillator potential. We exploit this analogy to characterize, by means of a detour to the Bose gas within the canonical ensemble, the probability distribution for finding a specified number of summands in a randomly chosen partition of an integer n. It is shown that this distribution approaches its asymptotics only for n > 1010.

Create a lesson