A Near-Optimal Algorithm for Computing Real Roots of Sparse Polynomials

Let $p\in\mathbb{Z}[x]$ be an arbitrary polynomial of degree $n$ with $k$ non-zero integer coefficients of absolute value less than $2^\tau$. In this paper, we answer the open question whether the real roots of $p$ can be computed with a number of arithmetic operations over the rational numbers that is polynomial in the input size of the sparse representation of $p$. More precisely, we give a deterministic, complete, and certified algorithm that determines isolating intervals for all real roots of $p$ with $O(k^3\cdot\log(n\tau)\cdot \log n)$ many exact arithmetic operations over the rational numbers. When using approximate but certified arithmetic, the bit complexity of our algorithm is bounded by $\tilde{O}(k^4\cdot n\tau)$, where $\tilde{O}(\cdot)$ means that we ignore logarithmic. Hence, for sufficiently sparse polynomials (i.e. $k=O(\log^c (n\tau))$ for a positive constant $c$), the bit complexity is $\tilde{O}(n\tau)$. We also prove that the latter bound is optimal up to logarithmic factors

Computing Real Roots of Real Polynomials

Computing the roots of a univariate polynomial is a fundamental and long-studied problem of computational algebra with applications in mathematics, engineering, computer science, and the natural sciences. For isolating as well as for approximating all complex roots, the best algorithm known is based on an almost optimal method for approximate polynomial factorization, introduced by Pan in 2002. Pan's factorization algorithm goes back to the splitting circle method from Schoenhage in 1982. The main drawbacks of Pan's method are that it is quite involved and that all roots have to be computed at the same time. For the important special case, where only the real roots have to be computed, much simpler methods are used in practice; however, they considerably lag behind Pan's method with respect to complexity. In this paper, we resolve this discrepancy by introducing a hybrid of the Descartes method and Newton iteration, denoted ANEWDSC, which is simpler than Pan's method, but achieves a run-time comparable to it. Our algorithm computes isolating intervals for the real roots of any real square-free polynomial, given by an oracle that provides arbitrary good approximations of the polynomial's coefficients. ANEWDSC can also be used to only isolate the roots in a given interval and to refine the isolating intervals to an arbitrary small size; it achieves near optimal complexity for the latter task.Comment: to appear in the Journal of Symbolic Computatio

On the Complexity of Real Root Isolation

We introduce a new approach to isolate the real roots of a square-free polynomial $F=\sum_{i=0}^n A_i x^i$ with real coefficients. It is assumed that each coefficient of $F$ can be approximated to any specified error bound. The presented method is exact, complete and deterministic. Due to its similarities to the Descartes method, we also consider it practical and easy to implement. Compared to previous approaches, our new method achieves a significantly better bit complexity. It is further shown that the hardness of isolating the real roots of $F$ is exclusively determined by the geometry of the roots and not by the complexity or the size of the coefficients. For the special case where $F$ has integer coefficients of maximal bitsize $\tau$, our bound on the bit complexity writes as $\tilde{O}(n^3\tau^2)$ which improves the best bounds known for existing practical algorithms by a factor of $n=deg F$. The crucial idea underlying the new approach is to run an approximate version of the Descartes method, where, in each subdivision step, we only consider approximations of the intermediate results to a certain precision. We give an upper bound on the maximal precision that is needed for isolating the roots of $F$. For integer polynomials, this bound is by a factor $n$ lower than that of the precision needed when using exact arithmetic explaining the improved bound on the bit complexity

An Elimination Method for Solving Bivariate Polynomial Systems: Eliminating the Usual Drawbacks

We present an exact and complete algorithm to isolate the real solutions of a zero-dimensional bivariate polynomial system. The proposed algorithm constitutes an elimination method which improves upon existing approaches in a number of points. First, the amount of purely symbolic operations is significantly reduced, that is, only resultant computation and square-free factorization is still needed. Second, our algorithm neither assumes generic position of the input system nor demands for any change of the coordinate system. The latter is due to a novel inclusion predicate to certify that a certain region is isolating for a solution. Our implementation exploits graphics hardware to expedite the resultant computation. Furthermore, we integrate a number of filtering techniques to improve the overall performance. Efficiency of the proposed method is proven by a comparison of our implementation with two state-of-the-art implementations, that is, LPG and Maple's isolate. For a series of challenging benchmark instances, experiments show that our implementation outperforms both contestants.Comment: 16 pages with appendix, 1 figure, submitted to ALENEX 201

When Newton meets Descartes: A Simple and Fast Algorithm to Isolate the Real Roots of a Polynomial

We introduce a new algorithm denoted DSC2 to isolate the real roots of a univariate square-free polynomial f with integer coefficients. The algorithm iteratively subdivides an initial interval which is known to contain all real roots of f. The main novelty of our approach is that we combine Descartes' Rule of Signs and Newton iteration. More precisely, instead of using a fixed subdivision strategy such as bisection in each iteration, a Newton step based on the number of sign variations for an actual interval is considered, and, only if the Newton step fails, we fall back to bisection. Following this approach, our analysis shows that, for most iterations, we can achieve quadratic convergence towards the real roots. In terms of complexity, our method induces a recursion tree of almost optimal size O(nlog(n tau)), where n denotes the degree of the polynomial and tau the bitsize of its coefficients. The latter bound constitutes an improvement by a factor of tau upon all existing subdivision methods for the task of isolating the real roots. In addition, we provide a bit complexity analysis showing that DSC2 needs only \tilde{O}(n^3tau) bit operations to isolate all real roots of f. This matches the best bound known for this fundamental problem. However, in comparison to the much more involved algorithms by Pan and Sch\"onhage (for the task of isolating all complex roots) which achieve the same bit complexity, DSC2 focuses on real root isolation, is very easy to access and easy to implement