Papers › Equal-Subset-Sum Faster Than the Meet-in-the-Middle
Equal-Subset-Sum Faster Than the Meet-in-the-Middle
Marcin Mucha, Jesper Nederlof, Jakub Pawlewicz, Karol Węgrzycki
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In the Equal-Subset-Sum problem, we are given a set S of n integers and the problem is to decide if there exist two disjoint nonempty subsets A,B ⊆S, whose elements sum up to the same value. The problem is NP-complete. The state-of-the-art algorithm runs in O^*(3^(n/2)) ≤O^*(1.7321ⁿ) time and is based on the meet-in-the-middle technique. In this paper, we improve upon this algorithm and give O^*(1.7088ⁿ) worst case Monte Carlo algorithm. This answers the open problem from Woeginger's inspirational survey. Additionally, we analyse the polynomial space algorithm for Equal-Subset-Sum. A naive polynomial space algorithm for Equal-Subset-Sum runs in O^*(3ⁿ) time. With read-only access to the exponentially many random bits, we show a randomized algorithm running in O^*(2.6817ⁿ) time and polynomial space.
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