Efficient construction of a small hitting set for combinatorial rectangles in high dimension

We describe a deterministic algorithm which, on input integersd, m and real number ∈∃ (0,1), produces a subset S of [m] d ={1,2,3,...,m} d that hits every combinatorial rectangle in [m] d of volume at least ∈, i.e., every subset of [m] d the formR1×R2×...×R d of size at least ∈m d . The cardinality of S is polynomial inm(logd)/∈, and the time to construct it is polynomial inmd/∈. The construction of such sets has applications in derandomization methods based on small sample spaces for general multivalued random variables.