Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Lovett, Shachar, Meka, Raghu, Wang, Yimeng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08676
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Table of Contents:
  • We introduce \emph{moonflowers}, a weaker analogue of sunflowers. A family of sets $S_1,\ldots,S_k$ is a $k$-moonflower if each set $S_i$ contains at least one element that is absent from all the others. We study the extremal problem of determining the largest possible size of a family of sets of size at most $w$ that avoids a $k$-moonflower, and obtain near-optimal bounds. As an application, we revisit the code sparsification problem studied by Brakensiek and Guruswami (STOC 2025) and improve the bounds to near optimal. Concretely, we improve the dependence on the block length from poly-logarithmic to logarithmic, and show that such a dependence is necessary.