195 research outputs found

    On the Complexity of the Cayley Semigroup Membership Problem

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    We investigate the complexity of deciding, given a multiplication table representing a semigroup S, a subset X of S and an element t of S, whether t can be expressed as a product of elements of X. It is well-known that this problem is {NL}-complete and that the more general Cayley groupoid membership problem, where the multiplication table is not required to be associative, is {P}-complete. For groups, the problem can be solved in deterministic log-space which raised the question of determining the exact complexity of this variant. Barrington, Kadau, Lange and McKenzie showed that for Abelian groups and for certain solvable groups, the problem is contained in the complexity class {FOLL} and they concluded that these variants are not hard for any complexity class containing {Parity}. The more general case of arbitrary groups remained open. In this work, we show that for both groups and for commutative semigroups, the problem is solvable in {qAC}^0 (quasi-polynomial size circuits of constant depth with unbounded fan-in) and conclude that these variants are also not hard for any class containing {Parity}. Moreover, we prove that {NL}-completeness already holds for the classes of 0-simple semigroups and nilpotent semigroups. Together with our results on groups and commutative semigroups, we prove the existence of a natural class of finite semigroups which generates a variety of finite semigroups with {NL}-complete Cayley semigroup membership, while the Cayley semigroup membership problem for the class itself is not {NL}-hard. We also discuss applications of our technique to {FOLL}

    Generic-case complexity, decision problems in group theory and random walks

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    We give a precise definition of ``generic-case complexity'' and show that for a very large class of finitely generated groups the classical decision problems of group theory - the word, conjugacy and membership problems - all have linear-time generic-case complexity. We prove such theorems by using the theory of random walks on regular graphs.Comment: Revised versio

    Knapsack Problems in Groups

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    We generalize the classical knapsack and subset sum problems to arbitrary groups and study the computational complexity of these new problems. We show that these problems, as well as the bounded submonoid membership problem, are P-time decidable in hyperbolic groups and give various examples of finitely presented groups where the subset sum problem is NP-complete.Comment: 28 pages, 12 figure
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