290 research outputs found
Arithmetic circuits: the chasm at depth four gets wider
In their paper on the "chasm at depth four", Agrawal and Vinay have shown
that polynomials in m variables of degree O(m) which admit arithmetic circuits
of size 2^o(m) also admit arithmetic circuits of depth four and size 2^o(m).
This theorem shows that for problems such as arithmetic circuit lower bounds or
black-box derandomization of identity testing, the case of depth four circuits
is in a certain sense the general case. In this paper we show that smaller
depth four circuits can be obtained if we start from polynomial size arithmetic
circuits. For instance, we show that if the permanent of n*n matrices has
circuits of size polynomial in n, then it also has depth 4 circuits of size
n^O(sqrt(n)*log(n)). Our depth four circuits use integer constants of
polynomial size. These results have potential applications to lower bounds and
deterministic identity testing, in particular for sums of products of sparse
univariate polynomials. We also give an application to boolean circuit
complexity, and a simple (but suboptimal) reduction to polylogarithmic depth
for arithmetic circuits of polynomial size and polynomially bounded degree
On defining irreducibility
We show that irreducibility is not a first-order definable property of real
algebraic varieties. The proof is based on the recent o-minimality result for
the exponential function. We conjecture that irreducibility is not a definable
property of complex algebraic varieties
Shallow Circuits with High-Powered Inputs
A polynomial identity testing algorithm must determine whether an input
polynomial (given for instance by an arithmetic circuit) is identically equal
to 0. In this paper, we show that a deterministic black-box identity testing
algorithm for (high-degree) univariate polynomials would imply a lower bound on
the arithmetic complexity of the permanent. The lower bounds that are known to
follow from derandomization of (low-degree) multivariate identity testing are
weaker. To obtain our lower bound it would be sufficient to derandomize
identity testing for polynomials of a very specific norm: sums of products of
sparse polynomials with sparse coefficients. This observation leads to new
versions of the Shub-Smale tau-conjecture on integer roots of univariate
polynomials. In particular, we show that a lower bound for the permanent would
follow if one could give a good enough bound on the number of real roots of
sums of products of sparse polynomials (Descartes' rule of signs gives such a
bound for sparse polynomials and products thereof). In this third version of
our paper we show that the same lower bound would follow even if one could only
prove a slightly superpolynomial upper bound on the number of real roots. This
is a consequence of a new result on reduction to depth 4 for arithmetic
circuits which we establish in a companion paper. We also show that an even
weaker bound on the number of real roots would suffice to obtain a lower bound
on the size of depth 4 circuits computing the permanent.Comment: A few typos correcte
Interpolation in Valiant's theory
We investigate the following question: if a polynomial can be evaluated at
rational points by a polynomial-time boolean algorithm, does it have a
polynomial-size arithmetic circuit? We argue that this question is certainly
difficult. Answering it negatively would indeed imply that the constant-free
versions of the algebraic complexity classes VP and VNP defined by Valiant are
different. Answering this question positively would imply a transfer theorem
from boolean to algebraic complexity. Our proof method relies on Lagrange
interpolation and on recent results connecting the (boolean) counting hierarchy
to algebraic complexity classes. As a byproduct we obtain two additional
results: (i) The constant-free, degree-unbounded version of Valiant's
hypothesis that VP and VNP differ implies the degree-bounded version. This
result was previously known to hold for fields of positive characteristic only.
(ii) If exponential sums of easy to compute polynomials can be computed
efficiently, then the same is true of exponential products. We point out an
application of this result to the P=NP problem in the Blum-Shub-Smale model of
computation over the field of complex numbers.Comment: 13 page
VPSPACE and a transfer theorem over the complex field
We extend the transfer theorem of [KP2007] to the complex field. That is, we
investigate the links between the class VPSPACE of families of polynomials and
the Blum-Shub-Smale model of computation over C. Roughly speaking, a family of
polynomials is in VPSPACE if its coefficients can be computed in polynomial
space. Our main result is that if (uniform, constant-free) VPSPACE families can
be evaluated efficiently then the class PAR of decision problems that can be
solved in parallel polynomial time over the complex field collapses to P. As a
result, one must first be able to show that there are VPSPACE families which
are hard to evaluate in order to separate P from NP over C, or even from PAR.Comment: 14 page
VPSPACE and a Transfer Theorem over the Reals
We introduce a new class VPSPACE of families of polynomials. Roughly
speaking, a family of polynomials is in VPSPACE if its coefficients can be
computed in polynomial space. Our main theorem is that if (uniform,
constant-free) VPSPACE families can be evaluated efficiently then the class PAR
of decision problems that can be solved in parallel polynomial time over the
real numbers collapses to P. As a result, one must first be able to show that
there are VPSPACE families which are hard to evaluate in order to separate over
the reals P from NP, or even from PAR.Comment: Full version of the paper (appendices of the first version are now
included in the text
Log-concavity and lower bounds for arithmetic circuits
One question that we investigate in this paper is, how can we build
log-concave polynomials using sparse polynomials as building blocks? More
precisely, let be a
polynomial satisfying the log-concavity condition a\_i^2 \textgreater{} \tau
a\_{i-1}a\_{i+1} for every where \tau
\textgreater{} 0. Whenever can be written under the form where the polynomials have at most
monomials, it is clear that . Assuming that the
have only non-negative coefficients, we improve this degree bound to if \tau \textgreater{} 1,
and to if .
This investigation has a complexity-theoretic motivation: we show that a
suitable strengthening of the above results would imply a separation of the
algebraic complexity classes VP and VNP. As they currently stand, these results
are strong enough to provide a new example of a family of polynomials in VNP
which cannot be computed by monotone arithmetic circuits of polynomial size
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