1,165 research outputs found
Lower Bounds on Quantum Query Complexity
Shor's and Grover's famous quantum algorithms for factoring and searching
show that quantum computers can solve certain computational problems
significantly faster than any classical computer. We discuss here what quantum
computers_cannot_ do, and specifically how to prove limits on their
computational power. We cover the main known techniques for proving lower
bounds, and exemplify and compare the methods.Comment: survey, 23 page
NP-hardness of circuit minimization for multi-output functions
Can we design efficient algorithms for finding fast algorithms? This question is captured by various circuit minimization problems, and algorithms for the corresponding tasks have significant practical applications. Following the work of Cook and Levin in the early 1970s, a central question is whether minimizing the circuit size of an explicitly given function is NP-complete. While this is known to hold in restricted models such as DNFs, making progress with respect to more expressive classes of circuits has been elusive.
In this work, we establish the first NP-hardness result for circuit minimization of total functions in the setting of general (unrestricted) Boolean circuits. More precisely, we show that computing the minimum circuit size of a given multi-output Boolean function f : {0,1}^n ? {0,1}^m is NP-hard under many-one polynomial-time randomized reductions. Our argument builds on a simpler NP-hardness proof for the circuit minimization problem for (single-output) Boolean functions under an extended set of generators.
Complementing these results, we investigate the computational hardness of minimizing communication. We establish that several variants of this problem are NP-hard under deterministic reductions. In particular, unless ? = ??, no polynomial-time computable function can approximate the deterministic two-party communication complexity of a partial Boolean function up to a polynomial. This has consequences for the class of structural results that one might hope to show about the communication complexity of partial functions
Shannon Information and Kolmogorov Complexity
We compare the elementary theories of Shannon information and Kolmogorov
complexity, the extent to which they have a common purpose, and where they are
fundamentally different. We discuss and relate the basic notions of both
theories: Shannon entropy versus Kolmogorov complexity, the relation of both to
universal coding, Shannon mutual information versus Kolmogorov (`algorithmic')
mutual information, probabilistic sufficient statistic versus algorithmic
sufficient statistic (related to lossy compression in the Shannon theory versus
meaningful information in the Kolmogorov theory), and rate distortion theory
versus Kolmogorov's structure function. Part of the material has appeared in
print before, scattered through various publications, but this is the first
comprehensive systematic comparison. The last mentioned relations are new.Comment: Survey, LaTeX 54 pages, 3 figures, Submitted to IEEE Trans
Information Theor
Approximating Hereditary Discrepancy via Small Width Ellipsoids
The Discrepancy of a hypergraph is the minimum attainable value, over
two-colorings of its vertices, of the maximum absolute imbalance of any
hyperedge. The Hereditary Discrepancy of a hypergraph, defined as the maximum
discrepancy of a restriction of the hypergraph to a subset of its vertices, is
a measure of its complexity. Lovasz, Spencer and Vesztergombi (1986) related
the natural extension of this quantity to matrices to rounding algorithms for
linear programs, and gave a determinant based lower bound on the hereditary
discrepancy. Matousek (2011) showed that this bound is tight up to a
polylogarithmic factor, leaving open the question of actually computing this
bound. Recent work by Nikolov, Talwar and Zhang (2013) showed a polynomial time
-approximation to hereditary discrepancy, as a by-product
of their work in differential privacy. In this paper, we give a direct simple
-approximation algorithm for this problem. We show that up to
this approximation factor, the hereditary discrepancy of a matrix is
characterized by the optimal value of simple geometric convex program that
seeks to minimize the largest norm of any point in a ellipsoid
containing the columns of . This characterization promises to be a useful
tool in discrepancy theory
Approaching MCSP from Above and Below: Hardness for a Conditional Variant and AC^0[p]
The Minimum Circuit Size Problem (MCSP) asks whether a given Boolean function has a circuit of at most a given size. MCSP has been studied for over a half-century and has deep connections throughout theoretical computer science including to cryptography, computational learning theory, and proof complexity. For example, we know (informally) that if MCSP is easy to compute, then most cryptography can be broken. Despite this cryptographic hardness connection and extensive research, we still know relatively little about the hardness of MCSP unconditionally. Indeed, until very recently it was unknown whether MCSP can be computed in AC^0[2] (Golovnev et al., ICALP 2019).
Our main contribution in this paper is to formulate a new "oracle" variant of circuit complexity and prove that this problem is NP-complete under randomized reductions. In more detail, we define the Minimum Oracle Circuit Size Problem (MOCSP) that takes as input the truth table of a Boolean function f, a size threshold s, and the truth table of an oracle Boolean function O, and determines whether there is a circuit with O-oracle gates and at most s wires that computes f. We prove that MOCSP is NP-complete under randomized polynomial-time reductions.
We also extend the recent AC^0[p] lower bound against MCSP by Golovnev et al. to a lower bound against the circuit minimization problem for depth-d formulas, (AC^0_d)-MCSP. We view this result as primarily a technical contribution. In particular, our proof takes a radically different approach from prior MCSP-related hardness results
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