18,560 research outputs found
DNF Sparsification and a Faster Deterministic Counting Algorithm
Given a DNF formula on n variables, the two natural size measures are the
number of terms or size s(f), and the maximum width of a term w(f). It is
folklore that short DNF formulas can be made narrow. We prove a converse,
showing that narrow formulas can be sparsified. More precisely, any width w DNF
irrespective of its size can be -approximated by a width DNF with
at most terms.
We combine our sparsification result with the work of Luby and Velikovic to
give a faster deterministic algorithm for approximately counting the number of
satisfying solutions to a DNF. Given a formula on n variables with poly(n)
terms, we give a deterministic time algorithm
that computes an additive approximation to the fraction of
satisfying assignments of f for \epsilon = 1/\poly(\log n). The previous best
result due to Luby and Velickovic from nearly two decades ago had a run-time of
.Comment: To appear in the IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity, 201
Subspace-Invariant AC Formulas
We consider the action of a linear subspace of on the set of
AC formulas with inputs labeled by literals in the set , where an element acts on formulas by
transposing the th pair of literals for all such that . A
formula is {\em -invariant} if it is fixed by this action. For example,
there is a well-known recursive construction of depth formulas of size
computing the -variable PARITY function; these
formulas are easily seen to be -invariant where is the subspace of
even-weight elements of . In this paper we establish a nearly
matching lower bound on the -invariant depth
formula size of PARITY. Quantitatively this improves the best known
lower bound for {\em unrestricted} depth
formulas, while avoiding the use of the switching lemma. More generally,
for any linear subspaces , we show that if a Boolean function is
-invariant and non-constant over , then its -invariant depth
formula size is at least where is the minimum Hamming
weight of a vector in
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