Theories for TC0 and Other Small Complexity Classes

We present a general method for introducing finitely axiomatizable "minimal" two-sorted theories for various subclasses of P (problems solvable in polynomial time). The two sorts are natural numbers and finite sets of natural numbers. The latter are essentially the finite binary strings, which provide a natural domain for defining the functions and sets in small complexity classes. We concentrate on the complexity class TC^0, whose problems are defined by uniform polynomial-size families of bounded-depth Boolean circuits with majority gates. We present an elegant theory VTC^0 in which the provably-total functions are those associated with TC^0, and then prove that VTC^0 is "isomorphic" to a different-looking single-sorted theory introduced by Johannsen and Pollet. The most technical part of the isomorphism proof is defining binary number multiplication in terms a bit-counting function, and showing how to formalize the proofs of its algebraic properties.Comment: 40 pages, Logical Methods in Computer Scienc

Algebraic Relations Between Harmonic Sums and Associated Quantities

We derive the algebraic relations of alternating and non-alternating finite harmonic sums up to the sums of depth~6. All relations for the sums up to weight~6 are given in explicit form. These relations depend on the structure of the index sets of the harmonic sums only, but not on their value. They are therefore valid for all other mathematical objects which obey the same multiplication relation or can be obtained as a special case thereof, as the harmonic polylogarithms. We verify that the number of independent elements for a given index set can be determined by counting the Lyndon words which are associated to this set. The algebraic relations between the finite harmonic sums can be used to reduce the high complexity of the expressions for the Mellin moments of the Wilson coefficients and splitting functions significantly for massless field theories as QED and QCD up to three loop and higher orders in the coupling constant and are also of importance for processes depending on more scales. The ratio of the number of independent sums thus obtained to the number of all sums for a given index set is found to be $\leq 1/d$ with $d$ the depth of the sum independently of the weight. The corresponding counting relations are given in analytic form for all classes of harmonic sums to arbitrary depth and are tabulated up to depth $d=10$.Comment: 39 pages LATEX, 1 style fil

Shallow Circuits with High-Powered Inputs

A polynomial identity testing algorithm must determine whether an input polynomial (given for instance by an arithmetic circuit) is identically equal to 0. In this paper, we show that a deterministic black-box identity testing algorithm for (high-degree) univariate polynomials would imply a lower bound on the arithmetic complexity of the permanent. The lower bounds that are known to follow from derandomization of (low-degree) multivariate identity testing are weaker. To obtain our lower bound it would be sufficient to derandomize identity testing for polynomials of a very specific norm: sums of products of sparse polynomials with sparse coefficients. This observation leads to new versions of the Shub-Smale tau-conjecture on integer roots of univariate polynomials. In particular, we show that a lower bound for the permanent would follow if one could give a good enough bound on the number of real roots of sums of products of sparse polynomials (Descartes' rule of signs gives such a bound for sparse polynomials and products thereof). In this third version of our paper we show that the same lower bound would follow even if one could only prove a slightly superpolynomial upper bound on the number of real roots. This is a consequence of a new result on reduction to depth 4 for arithmetic circuits which we establish in a companion paper. We also show that an even weaker bound on the number of real roots would suffice to obtain a lower bound on the size of depth 4 circuits computing the permanent.Comment: A few typos correcte

Immunity and Simplicity for Exact Counting and Other Counting Classes

Ko [RAIRO 24, 1990] and Bruschi [TCS 102, 1992] showed that in some relativized world, PSPACE (in fact, ParityP) contains a set that is immune to the polynomial hierarchy (PH). In this paper, we study and settle the question of (relativized) separations with immunity for PH and the counting classes PP, C_{=}P, and ParityP in all possible pairwise combinations. Our main result is that there is an oracle A relative to which C_{=}P contains a set that is immune to BPP^{ParityP}. In particular, this C_{=}P^A set is immune to PH^{A} and ParityP^{A}. Strengthening results of Tor\'{a}n [J.ACM 38, 1991] and Green [IPL 37, 1991], we also show that, in suitable relativizations, NP contains a C_{=}P-immune set, and ParityP contains a PP^{PH}-immune set. This implies the existence of a C_{=}P^{B}-simple set for some oracle B, which extends results of Balc\'{a}zar et al. [SIAM J.Comp. 14, 1985; RAIRO 22, 1988] and provides the first example of a simple set in a class not known to be contained in PH. Our proof technique requires a circuit lower bound for ``exact counting'' that is derived from Razborov's [Mat. Zametki 41, 1987] lower bound for majority.Comment: 20 page