Searching for Disjoint Covering Systems with Precisely One Repeated Modulus

TL;DR

This paper extends the classification of disjoint covering systems with a specific repeated largest modulus up to 32 repeats, providing a comprehensive list of such systems with high confidence in their completeness.

Contribution

It continues the enumeration of disjoint covering systems with a repeated largest modulus up to 32, expanding previous results and confirming the lists' completeness for moduli up to 600.

Findings

Lists of systems extended up to r=32

High confidence in list completeness for largest modulus ≤ 600

Supports conjecture on finiteness of such systems for fixed r

Abstract

A set of arithmetical sequences $$ a_1\, (\bmod{ \,\, m_1}) \quad, \quad a_2 \, (\bmod{\,\, m_2}) \quad, \quad \dots \quad , \quad a_k \, (\bmod{\,\,m_k}) \quad \quad , $$ with $$ m_1 \leq m_2 \leq \dots \leq m_k \quad \quad , $$ is called a {\it disjoint covering system} (alias {\it exact covering system}) if every positive integer belongs to {\bf exactly} one of the sequences. Mirski, Newman, Davenport and Rado famously proved that the moduli can't all be distinct. In fact the two largest moduli must be equal, i.e. $m_{k-1}=m_k$ This raises the natural question:"How close can you get to getting distinct moduli?", in other words, can you find all such systems where all the moduli are distinct except the largest, that is repeated $r$ times, for any, specific given $r$? It turns out (conjecturally, but almost certainly) that excluding the trivial case where the smallest modulus is 2, for any number of repeats $r$, there are only finitely many such systems. Marc Berger, Alexander Felzenbaum and Aviezri Fraenkel found them all for $r$ up to $9$, and Mekmamu Zeleke and Jamie Simpson extended the list for systems up to $12$ repeats. In the present article we continue the list up to $r=32$. All our systems are correct, but we did not bother to formally prove completeness, but we know for sure that the lists are complete if the largest modulus is $\leq 600$, and we are pretty sure that they are complete.