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This Demonstration has many but not all sparse rulers. Up to length 198, there are sparse rulers, with of them for length 59 alone. Many of the longest known sparse rulers for a particular number of marks are Wichmann rulers. A Wichmann ruler generator is given in the Initialization.

In a Golomb ruler, distances can be missing but none can be repeated.

In a sparse ruler, distances can be repeated but none can be missing.

In a difference set, modular distances cannot be missing or repeated.

For a minimal sparse ruler of length with marks, let the excess be . The excess is always 0 or 1.

The "show ruler" box is a toggle for "show grid" of excess to length 2103.