Resource Bounded Immunity and Simplicity

Revisiting the thirty years-old notions of resource-bounded immunity and simplicity, we investigate the structural characteristics of various immunity notions: strong immunity, almost immunity, and hyperimmunity as well as their corresponding simplicity notions. We also study limited immunity and simplicity, called k-immunity and feasible k-immunity, and their simplicity notions. Finally, we propose the k-immune hypothesis as a working hypothesis that guarantees the existence of simple sets in NP.Comment: This is a complete version of the conference paper that appeared in the Proceedings of the 3rd IFIP International Conference on Theoretical Computer Science, Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp.81-95, Toulouse, France, August 23-26, 200

Genericity and measure for exponential time

AbstractRecently, Lutz [14, 15] introduced a polynomial time bounded version of Lebesgue measure. He and others (see e.g. [11, 13–18, 20]) used this concept to investigate the quantitative structure of Exponential Time (E = DTIME(2lin)). Previously, Ambos-Spies et al. [2, 3] introduced polynomial time bounded genericity concepts and used them for the investigation of structural properties of NP (under appropriate assumptions) and E. Here we relate these concepts to each other. We show that, for any c ⩾ 1, the class of nc-generic sets has p-measure 1. This allows us to simplify and extend certain p-measure 1-results. To illustrate the power of generic sets we take the Small Span Theorem of Juedes and Lutz [11] as an example and prove a generalization for bounded query reductions

Autoreducibility of NP-Complete Sets

We study the polynomial-time autoreducibility of NP-complete sets and obtain separations under strong hypotheses for NP. Assuming there is a p-generic set in NP, we show the following: - For every $k \geq 2$, there is a $k$-T-complete set for NP that is $k$-T autoreducible, but is not $k$-tt autoreducible or $(k-1)$-T autoreducible. - For every $k \geq 3$, there is a $k$-tt-complete set for NP that is $k$-tt autoreducible, but is not $(k-1)$-tt autoreducible or $(k-2)$-T autoreducible. - There is a tt-complete set for NP that is tt-autoreducible, but is not btt-autoreducible. Under the stronger assumption that there is a p-generic set in NP $\cap$ coNP, we show: - For every $k \geq 2$, there is a $k$-tt-complete set for NP that is $k$-tt autoreducible, but is not $(k-1)$-T autoreducible. Our proofs are based on constructions from separating NP-completeness notions. For example, the construction of a 2-T-complete set for NP that is not 2-tt-complete also separates 2-T-autoreducibility from 2-tt-autoreducibility

On New Notions of Algorithmic Dimension, Immunity, and Medvedev Degree

Ph.D

Weak Completeness Notions for Exponential Time

Abstract The standard way for proving a problem to be intractable is to show that the problem is hard or complete for one of the standard complexity classes containing intractable problems. Lutz (1995) proposed a generalization of this approach by introducing more general weak hardness notions which still imply intractability. While a set A is hard for a class C if all problems in C can be reduced to A (by a polynomial-time bounded many-one reduction) and complete if it is hard and a member of C, Lutz proposed to call a set A weakly hard if a nonnegligible part of C can be reduced to A and to call A weakly complete if in addition A 2 C. For the exponential-time classes E = DTIME(2lin) and EXP = DTIME(2poly), Lutz formalized these ideas by introducing resource bounded (Lebesgue) measures on these classes and by saying that a subclass of E is negligible if it has measure 0 in E (and similarly for EXP). A variant of these concepts, based on resource bounded Baire category in place of measure, was introduced by Ambos-Spies (1996) where now a class is declared to be negligible if it is meager in the corresponding resource bounded sense. In our thesis we introduce and investigate new, more general, weak hardness notions for E and EXP and compare them with the above concepts from the literature. The two main new notions we introduce are nontriviality, which may be viewed as the most general weak hardness notion, and strong nontriviality. In case of E, a set A is E-nontrivial if, for any k 1, A has a predecessor in E which is 2kn complex, i.e., which can only be computed by Turing machines with run times exceeding 2kn on infinitely many inputs; and A is strongly E-nontrivial if there are predecessors which are almost everywhere 2kn complex. Besides giving examples and structural properties of the E-(non)trivial and strongly E-(non)trivial sets, we separate all weak hardness concepts for E, compare the corresponding concepts for E and EXP, answer the question whether (strongly) E-nontrivial sets are typical among the sets in E (or among the computable sets, or among all sets), investigate the degrees of the (strongly) E-nontrivial sets, and analyze the strength of these concepts if we replace the underlying p-m-reducibility by some weaker polynomial-time reducibilities