284 research outputs found
On vanishing of Kronecker coefficients
We show that the problem of deciding positivity of Kronecker coefficients is
NP-hard. Previously, this problem was conjectured to be in P, just as for the
Littlewood-Richardson coefficients. Our result establishes in a formal way that
Kronecker coefficients are more difficult than Littlewood-Richardson
coefficients, unless P=NP.
We also show that there exists a #P-formula for a particular subclass of
Kronecker coefficients whose positivity is NP-hard to decide. This is an
evidence that, despite the hardness of the positivity problem, there may well
exist a positive combinatorial formula for the Kronecker coefficients. Finding
such a formula is a major open problem in representation theory and algebraic
combinatorics.
Finally, we consider the existence of the partition triples such that the Kronecker coefficient but the
Kronecker coefficient for some integer
. Such "holes" are of great interest as they witness the failure of the
saturation property for the Kronecker coefficients, which is still poorly
understood. Using insight from computational complexity theory, we turn our
hardness proof into a positive result: We show that not only do there exist
many such triples, but they can also be found efficiently. Specifically, we
show that, for any , there exists such that, for all
, there exist partition triples in the
Kronecker cone such that: (a) the Kronecker coefficient
is zero, (b) the height of is , (c) the height of is , and (d) . The proof of the last result
illustrates the effectiveness of the explicit proof strategy of GCT.Comment: 43 pages, 1 figur
A PSPACE Construction of a Hitting Set for the Closure of Small Algebraic Circuits
In this paper we study the complexity of constructing a hitting set for the
closure of VP, the class of polynomials that can be infinitesimally
approximated by polynomials that are computed by polynomial sized algebraic
circuits, over the real or complex numbers. Specifically, we show that there is
a PSPACE algorithm that given n,s,r in unary outputs a set of n-tuples over the
rationals of size poly(n,s,r), with poly(n,s,r) bit complexity, that hits all
n-variate polynomials of degree-r that are the limit of size-s algebraic
circuits. Previously it was known that a random set of this size is a hitting
set, but a construction that is certified to work was only known in EXPSPACE
(or EXPH assuming the generalized Riemann hypothesis). As a corollary we get
that a host of other algebraic problems such as Noether Normalization Lemma,
can also be solved in PSPACE deterministically, where earlier only randomized
algorithms and EXPSPACE algorithms (or EXPH assuming the generalized Riemann
hypothesis) were known.
The proof relies on the new notion of a robust hitting set which is a set of
inputs such that any nonzero polynomial that can be computed by a polynomial
size algebraic circuit, evaluates to a not too small value on at least one
element of the set. Proving the existence of such a robust hitting set is the
main technical difficulty in the proof.
Our proof uses anti-concentration results for polynomials, basic tools from
algebraic geometry and the existential theory of the reals
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