Weak Completeness Notions for Exponential Time

Abstract The standard way for proving a problem to be intractable is to show that the problem is hard or complete for one of the standard complexity classes containing intractable problems. Lutz (1995) proposed a generalization of this approach by introducing more general weak hardness notions which still imply intractability. While a set A is hard for a class C if all problems in C can be reduced to A (by a polynomial-time bounded many-one reduction) and complete if it is hard and a member of C, Lutz proposed to call a set A weakly hard if a nonnegligible part of C can be reduced to A and to call A weakly complete if in addition A 2 C. For the exponential-time classes E = DTIME(2lin) and EXP = DTIME(2poly), Lutz formalized these ideas by introducing resource bounded (Lebesgue) measures on these classes and by saying that a subclass of E is negligible if it has measure 0 in E (and similarly for EXP). A variant of these concepts, based on resource bounded Baire category in place of measure, was introduced by Ambos-Spies (1996) where now a class is declared to be negligible if it is meager in the corresponding resource bounded sense. In our thesis we introduce and investigate new, more general, weak hardness notions for E and EXP and compare them with the above concepts from the literature. The two main new notions we introduce are nontriviality, which may be viewed as the most general weak hardness notion, and strong nontriviality. In case of E, a set A is E-nontrivial if, for any k 1, A has a predecessor in E which is 2kn complex, i.e., which can only be computed by Turing machines with run times exceeding 2kn on infinitely many inputs; and A is strongly E-nontrivial if there are predecessors which are almost everywhere 2kn complex. Besides giving examples and structural properties of the E-(non)trivial and strongly E-(non)trivial sets, we separate all weak hardness concepts for E, compare the corresponding concepts for E and EXP, answer the question whether (strongly) E-nontrivial sets are typical among the sets in E (or among the computable sets, or among all sets), investigate the degrees of the (strongly) E-nontrivial sets, and analyze the strength of these concepts if we replace the underlying p-m-reducibility by some weaker polynomial-time reducibilities

Resource Bounded Immunity and Simplicity

Revisiting the thirty years-old notions of resource-bounded immunity and simplicity, we investigate the structural characteristics of various immunity notions: strong immunity, almost immunity, and hyperimmunity as well as their corresponding simplicity notions. We also study limited immunity and simplicity, called k-immunity and feasible k-immunity, and their simplicity notions. Finally, we propose the k-immune hypothesis as a working hypothesis that guarantees the existence of simple sets in NP.Comment: This is a complete version of the conference paper that appeared in the Proceedings of the 3rd IFIP International Conference on Theoretical Computer Science, Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp.81-95, Toulouse, France, August 23-26, 200

The prospects for mathematical logic in the twenty-first century

The four authors present their speculations about the future developments of mathematical logic in the twenty-first century. The areas of recursion theory, proof theory and logic for computer science, model theory, and set theory are discussed independently.Comment: Association for Symbolic Logi

Digraph Complexity Measures and Applications in Formal Language Theory

We investigate structural complexity measures on digraphs, in particular the cycle rank. This concept is intimately related to a classical topic in formal language theory, namely the star height of regular languages. We explore this connection, and obtain several new algorithmic insights regarding both cycle rank and star height. Among other results, we show that computing the cycle rank is NP-complete, even for sparse digraphs of maximum outdegree 2. Notwithstanding, we provide both a polynomial-time approximation algorithm and an exponential-time exact algorithm for this problem. The former algorithm yields an O((log n)^(3/2))- approximation in polynomial time, whereas the latter yields the optimum solution, and runs in time and space O*(1.9129^n) on digraphs of maximum outdegree at most two. Regarding the star height problem, we identify a subclass of the regular languages for which we can precisely determine the computational complexity of the star height problem. Namely, the star height problem for bideterministic languages is NP-complete, and this holds already for binary alphabets. Then we translate the algorithmic results concerning cycle rank to the bideterministic star height problem, thus giving a polynomial-time approximation as well as a reasonably fast exact exponential algorithm for bideterministic star height.Comment: 19 pages, 1 figur

Perspectives for proof unwinding by programming languages techniques

In this chapter, we propose some future directions of work, potentially beneficial to Mathematics and its foundations, based on the recent import of methodology from the theory of programming languages into proof theory. This scientific essay, written for the audience of proof theorists as well as the working mathematician, is not a survey of the field, but rather a personal view of the author who hopes that it may inspire future and fellow researchers

Multidimensional hyperbolic billiards

The theory of planar hyperbolic billiards is already quite well developed by having also achieved spectacular successes. In addition there also exists an excellent monograph by Chernov and Markarian on the topic. In contrast, apart from a series of works culminating in Sim\'anyi's remarkable result on the ergodicity of hard ball systems and other sporadic successes, the theory of hyperbolic billiards in dimension 3 or more is much less understood. The goal of this work is to survey the key results of their theory and highlight some central problems which deserve particular attention and efforts

A Measure of Space for Computing over the Reals

We propose a new complexity measure of space for the BSS model of computation. We define LOGSPACE\_W and PSPACE\_W complexity classes over the reals. We prove that LOGSPACE\_W is included in NC^2\_R and in P\_W, i.e. is small enough for being relevant. We prove that the Real Circuit Decision Problem is P\_R-complete under LOGSPACE\_W reductions, i.e. that LOGSPACE\_W is large enough for containing natural algorithms. We also prove that PSPACE\_W is included in PAR\_R