You can pre-compute that set of sets (of course throwing away numbers with just 0, 1 or 2 bits set because we suspect they would slow us down without delivering) fit them in memory and then crunch the problem like a bug.
I've thrown together two simple scripts (in perl) which show that the known solution fits both of my rules. Hopefully I can write a program that would find solutions for any given NxM (or tell that no solution exists) tomorrow or something like that.
Still I suspect the solution would hit the wall because e.g. sets would be too big therefore the program would take actual ages to run, but one can surely hope?
> Still I suspect the solution would hit the wall because e.g. sets would be too big therefore the program would take actual ages to run, but one can surely hope?
I suspect something will go wrong, and this seems to me the obvious place for it to fail. But I expect it to fail mostly based on "if it was that easy, someone would probably have noticed", not because I have any particular insight into the problem.
Everybody know that some thing is impossible to do. But one person who didn't know that accidentally does it.
Right now I have one type-1 set having 36 numbers in it. The first numbers are 7, 25 and 42. I like it.
Yes, but a dramatic reduction in complexity still leaves a lot of complexity.
Your conditions seem to be a lot simpler than they originally appear. If I interpret you correctly, we're drawing seventeen 4-tuples of seventeen-bit numbers such that
> every tuple is a subset of one of the sets in the second set
"the elements of each tuple have no bits in common", and
> every drawn number is contained in one of sets in the first set
"each number has at most one bit set".
But there are only eighteen seventeen-bit numbers with at most one bit set, or seventeen if you exclude 0 (which seems reasonable). So isomorphically, we're trying to find seventeen 4-tuples of distinct numbers less than seventeen.
This is indeed easy (there are (17 choose 4) = 2380 of them), but I don't understand what you hope to do with these. At any rate, I don't think they particularly help solve the problem at hand.