Perfect Skolem sets

Abstract

A Skolem sequence is a sequence a_1,a_2,...,a_2n (where a_i \in A = {1,...,n }), each a_i occurs exactly twice in the sequence and the two occurrences are exactly a_i positions apart. A set A that can be used to construct Skolem sequences is called a Skolem set. The problem of deciding which sets of the form A = {1,...,n} are Skolem sets was solved by Thoralf Skolem in the late 1950's. We study the natural generalization where A is allowed to be any set of n positive integers. We give necessary conditions for the existence of Skolem sets of this generalized form. We conjecture these necessary conditions to be sufficient, and give computational evidence in favor of our conjecture. We investigate special cases of the conjecture and prove that the conjecture hold for some of them. We also study enumerative questions and show that this problem has strong connections with problems related to permutation displacements.