A nonlinear lower bound on the practical combinational complexity

AbstractAn infinite sequence F = {fn}n = 1∞ of one-output Boolean functions with the following two properties is constructed: 1.(1)fn can be computed by a Boolean circuit with O(n) gates.2.(2)For any positive, nondecreasing, and unbounded function h : N → R, each Boolean circuit having an mh(m) separator requires a nonlinear number Ω(nh(n)) of gates to compute fn (e.g., each planar Boolean circuit requires Ω(n2) gates to compute fn).Thus, one can say that fn has linear combinational complexity and a nonlinear practical combinational complexity because the constant-degree parallel architectures used in practice have separators in O(mlog2 m)