ON TENSOR POWERS OF INTEGER PROGRAMS

A natural product on integer programming problems with nonnegative coefficients is defined. Hypergraph covering problems are a special case of such integer programs, and the product defined is a generalization of the usual hypergraph product. The main theorem of this paper gives a sufficient condition under which the solution to the nth power of an integer program is asymptotically as good as the solution to the same nth power when the variables are not necessarily integral but may be arbitrary nonnegative real numbers.