Renormalization and Computation II: Time Cut-off and the Halting Problem

This is the second installment to the project initiated in [Ma3]. In the first Part, I argued that both philosophy and technique of the perturbative renormalization in quantum field theory could be meaningfully transplanted to the theory of computation, and sketched several contexts supporting this view. In this second part, I address some of the issues raised in [Ma3] and provide their development in three contexts: a categorification of the algorithmic computations; time cut--off and Anytime Algorithms; and finally, a Hopf algebra renormalization of the Halting Problem.Comment: 28 page

Approximating orthogonal matrices by permutation matrices

Motivated in part by a problem of combinatorial optimization and in part by analogies with quantum computations, we consider approximations of orthogonal matrices U by ``non-commutative convex combinations'' A of permutation matrices of the type A=sum A_sigma sigma, where sigma are permutation matrices and A_sigma are positive semidefinite nxn matrices summing up to the identity matrix. We prove that for every nxn orthogonal matrix U there is a non-commutative convex combination A of permutation matrices which approximates U entry-wise within an error of c n^{-1/2}ln n and in the Frobenius norm within an error of c ln n. The proof uses a certain procedure of randomized rounding of an orthogonal matrix to a permutation matrix.Comment: 18 page