Higher-order complexity in analysis

International audienceWe present ongoing work on the development of complexity theory in analysis. Kawamura and Cook recently showed how to carry out complexity theory on the space C[0,1] of continuous real functions on the unit interval. It is done, as in computable analysis, by representing objects by first-order functions (from finite words to finite words, say) and by measuring the complexity of a second-order functional in terms of second-order polynomials. We prove that this framework cannot be directly applied to spaces that are not $\sigma$-compact. However, representing objects by higher-order functions (over finite words, say) makes it possible to carry out complexity theory on such spaces: for this purpose we develop the complexity of higher-order functionals. At orders above 3, our class of polynomial-time computable functionals strictly contains the class BFF of Buss, Cook and Urquhart

Bounded time computation on metric spaces and Banach spaces

We extend the framework by Kawamura and Cook for investigating computational complexity for operators occurring in analysis. This model is based on second-order complexity theory for functions on the Baire space, which is lifted to metric spaces by means of representations. Time is measured in terms of the length of the input encodings and the required output precision. We propose the notions of a complete representation and of a regular representation. We show that complete representations ensure that any computable function has a time bound. Regular representations generalize Kawamura and Cook's more restrictive notion of a second-order representation, while still guaranteeing fast computability of the length of the encodings. Applying these notions, we investigate the relationship between purely metric properties of a metric space and the existence of a representation such that the metric is computable within bounded time. We show that a bound on the running time of the metric can be straightforwardly translated into size bounds of compact subsets of the metric space. Conversely, for compact spaces and for Banach spaces we construct a family of admissible, complete, regular representations that allow for fast computation of the metric and provide short encodings. Here it is necessary to trade the time bound off against the length of encodings