On 6 Jun 2021, at 16:58, Andrei Kulakov <andrei.avk@gmail.com> wrote:

In Math / CompSci there is a definition that almost exactly matches this: Exact Cover - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exact_cover

The difference is that, IIRC, solving the problem is finding and removing all subsets that are unneeded to create an exact cover, so it's kind of arriving at it from a different direction, but 'exact cover' definition itself is a good match.

I’m not sure it’s a quite the same - it doesn’t require that the sets in the cover have cardinality 1, which I think Ethan does.

And the ‘exact’ requirement (that each bit is covered once) surely doesn’t apply.

It’s more like “full cover by singletons”.