18,334 research outputs found
A Casual Tour Around a Circuit Complexity Bound
I will discuss the recent proof that the complexity class NEXP
(nondeterministic exponential time) lacks nonuniform ACC circuits of polynomial
size. The proof will be described from the perspective of someone trying to
discover it.Comment: 21 pages, 2 figures. An earlier version appeared in SIGACT News,
September 201
Nesting Depth of Operators in Graph Database Queries: Expressiveness Vs. Evaluation Complexity
Designing query languages for graph structured data is an active field of
research, where expressiveness and efficient algorithms for query evaluation
are conflicting goals. To better handle dynamically changing data, recent work
has been done on designing query languages that can compare values stored in
the graph database, without hard coding the values in the query. The main idea
is to allow variables in the query and bind the variables to values when
evaluating the query. For query languages that bind variables only once, query
evaluation is usually NP-complete. There are query languages that allow binding
inside the scope of Kleene star operators, which can themselves be in the scope
of bindings and so on. Uncontrolled nesting of binding and iteration within one
another results in query evaluation being PSPACE-complete.
We define a way to syntactically control the nesting depth of iterated
bindings, and study how this affects expressiveness and efficiency of query
evaluation. The result is an infinite, syntactically defined hierarchy of
expressions. We prove that the corresponding language hierarchy is strict.
Given an expression in the hierarchy, we prove that it is undecidable to check
if there is a language equivalent expression at lower levels. We prove that
evaluating a query based on an expression at level i can be done in
in the polynomial time hierarchy. Satisfiability of quantified Boolean formulas
can be reduced to query evaluation; we study the relationship between
alternations in Boolean quantifiers and the depth of nesting of iterated
bindings.Comment: Improvements from ICALP 2016 review comment
Boolean Operations, Joins, and the Extended Low Hierarchy
We prove that the join of two sets may actually fall into a lower level of
the extended low hierarchy than either of the sets. In particular, there exist
sets that are not in the second level of the extended low hierarchy, EL_2, yet
their join is in EL_2. That is, in terms of extended lowness, the join operator
can lower complexity. Since in a strong intuitive sense the join does not lower
complexity, our result suggests that the extended low hierarchy is unnatural as
a complexity measure. We also study the closure properties of EL_ and prove
that EL_2 is not closed under certain Boolean operations. To this end, we
establish the first known (and optimal) EL_2 lower bounds for certain notions
generalizing Selman's P-selectivity, which may be regarded as an interesting
result in its own right.Comment: 12 page
On space efficiency of algorithms working on structural decompositions of graphs
Dynamic programming on path and tree decompositions of graphs is a technique
that is ubiquitous in the field of parameterized and exponential-time
algorithms. However, one of its drawbacks is that the space usage is
exponential in the decomposition's width. Following the work of Allender et al.
[Theory of Computing, '14], we investigate whether this space complexity
explosion is unavoidable. Using the idea of reparameterization of Cai and
Juedes [J. Comput. Syst. Sci., '03], we prove that the question is closely
related to a conjecture that the Longest Common Subsequence problem
parameterized by the number of input strings does not admit an algorithm that
simultaneously uses XP time and FPT space. Moreover, we complete the complexity
landscape sketched for pathwidth and treewidth by Allender et al. by
considering the parameter tree-depth. We prove that computations on tree-depth
decompositions correspond to a model of non-deterministic machines that work in
polynomial time and logarithmic space, with access to an auxiliary stack of
maximum height equal to the decomposition's depth. Together with the results of
Allender et al., this describes a hierarchy of complexity classes for
polynomial-time non-deterministic machines with different restrictions on the
access to working space, which mirrors the classic relations between treewidth,
pathwidth, and tree-depth.Comment: An extended abstract appeared in the proceedings of STACS'16. The new
version is augmented with a space-efficient algorithm for Dominating Set
using the Chinese remainder theore
Randomness in completeness and space-bounded computations
The study of computational complexity investigates the role of various computational resources such as processing time, memory requirements, nondeterminism, randomness, nonuniformity, etc. to solve different types of computational problems. In this dissertation, we study the role of randomness in two fundamental areas of computational complexity: NP-completeness and space-bounded computations.
The concept of completeness plays an important role in defining the notion of \u27hard\u27 problems in Computer Science. Intuitively, an NP-complete problem captures the difficulty of solving any problem in NP. Polynomial-time reductions are at the heart of defining completeness. However, there is no single notion of reduction; researchers identified various polynomial-time reductions such as many-one reduction, truth-table reduction, Turing reduction, etc. Each such notion of reduction induces a notion of completeness. Finding the relationships among various NP-completeness notions is a significant open problem. Our first result is about the separation of two such polynomial-time completeness notions for NP, namely, Turing completeness and many-one completeness. This is the first result that separates completeness notions for NP under a worst-case hardness hypothesis.
Our next result involves a conjecture by Even, Selman, and Yacobi [ESY84,SY82] which states that there do not exist disjoint NP-pairs all of whose separators are NP-hard via Turing reductions. If true, this conjecture implies that a certain kind of probabilistic public-key cryptosystems is not secure. The conjecture is open for 30 years. We provide evidence in support of a variant of this conjecture. We show that if there exist certain secure one-way functions, then the ESY conjecture for the bounded-truth-table reduction holds.
Now we turn our attention to space-bounded computations. We investigate probabilistic space-bounded machines that are allowed to access their random bits {\em multiple times}. Our main conceptual contribution here is to establish an interesting connection between derandomization of such probabilistic space-bounded machines and the derandomization of probabilistic time-bounded machines. In particular, we show that if we can derandomize a multipass machine even with a small number of passes over random tape and only O(log^2 n) random bits to deterministic polynomial-time, then BPTIME(n) ⊆ DTIME(2^{o(n)}). Note that if we restrict the number of random bits to O(log n), then we can trivially derandomize the machine to polynomial time. Furthermore, it can be shown that if we restrict the number of passes to O(1), we can still derandomize the machine to polynomial time. Thus our result implies that any extension beyond these trivialities will lead to an unknown derandomization of BPTIME(n).
Our final contribution is about the derandomization of probabilistic time-bounded machines under branching program lower bounds. The standard method of derandomizing time-bounded probabilistic machines depends on various circuit lower bounds, which are notoriously hard to prove. We show that the derandomization of low-degree polynomial identity testing, a well-known problem in co-RP, can be obtained under certain branching program lower bounds. Note that branching programs are considered weaker model of computation than the Boolean circuits
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