# All Questions

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### Lower bounds for quantum circuits using the geodesic framework

(this question is a crosspost from cstheory. I've incorporated the one answer there into the question) Some of us have been reading Michael Nielsen's paper on a geometric approach to using quantum ...
276 views

### Mutual information vs. Product sets

Suppose we have two dependent random variables $X$ and $Y$, each of which is uniform over $\{0,1\}^n$, such that their mutual information $I(X;Y)$ is small, say, at most $\sqrt{n}$. Does this imply ...
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### Computability of a “weird” set

The starting point of this question is the observation that the smallest positive integers $a,b,c$ satisfying $$\frac{a}{b+c} + \frac{b}{a+c} + \frac{c}{a+b} = 4$$ are absurdly high. This leads to ...
361 views

### Are there simple core languages which are consistent and expressive?

The Calculus of Constructions is a very simple core functional language with dependent types. Per curry-howard isomorphism, it could, potentially, be very useful for writing programs and proofs. It, ...
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### Fourier spectrum of the parity of two monotone Boolean functions

This is a question that I've been pondering, on and off, for a while, and unsuccessfully. I'd be very interested in any insight regarding this conjecture. (Or rather, these conjectures.) Recall that, ...
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### Manuel Blum's supervisory style

Manuel Blum is a well-known theoretical computer scientist and a Turing award winner. But more interestingly, he has the highest number of students who have gone on to win a Turing award (Leonard ...
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### Does solving matrix multiplication in quadratic time imply that SETH is false?

I have a little conjecture that if you could perform matrix multiplication (or solve 3-clique) in $O(n^2 \log(n))$ time, then you could solve CNF-SAT in $O(2^{(1-\epsilon)n})$ time. In other words, ...
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### Is it possible to find the median with a linear size sorting network?

Is there a sorting network that makes only $O(n)$ comparisons and finds the median? The AKS sorting network sorts with $O(\log n)$ parallel steps, but here I am only interested in the number of ...
237 views

### Is it possible to make trapdoor board games?

Motivated partly by this MO question, I am wondering if it's possible to design a board game where there is a simple winning strategy but it's hard to find. For example, the game of picking a random ...
310 views

### Sign patterns for Fourier coefficients of Boolean functions

Given a sequence of real numbers $(a_i)$, the sign-pattern sequence $(s_i)$ is defined by $s_i = +$ if $a_i \geq 0$ and $s_i = -$ otherwise. For a boolean function $f: \{0,1\}^n \to \{0,1\}$, ...
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### Does ${\bf L} \neq {\bf NL}$ imply ${\bf P} \neq {\bf NP}$?

This question is inspired by this question Implications between $\mathsf{L}=\mathsf{P}$ and $\mathsf{NL}=\mathsf{NP}$? We do know that ${\bf L}$ could equal ${\bf NL}$ and at the same time ${\bf P}$ ...
217 views

### Do circuits allow to derive EXPSPACE hardness results?

It seems that encoding an NP-complete problem succinctly often makes it nexptime-complete. For instance, 3SAT or HAMILTONIAN PATH become NEXPTIME-complete when the encoding is succint, eg using ...
296 views

### Exponential-time factorization of polynomials

Let an explicit field be a field for which equality is decidable (in some standard model of computation). I am interested in the factorization of univariate polynomials over an explicit field. It is ...
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### Fano's inequality in the high error regime

Fano's inequality says that given a random variable $X$, and a random variable $Y$ that "guesses" $X$ correctly with some probability, we can lower bound the information that $Y$ gives on $X$. More ...
282 views

### First use of sans serif for complexity classes

(Apologies for the triviality of this question; nevertheless, it's been bugging me and presumably people here will be able to answer it...) It seems that it has become popular in recent years to ...
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### Finding all-pairs anti-distance

Thanks for a great forum. This is my first post here. I am working on a signal processing application and the core of one the main algorithms reduces to a graph theoretical problem. Let $G=(V,E)$ ...
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### minimizing size of regular expression

Suppose we have a regular language specified by a regex, for example, (ab|ac)* and we wish to find an equivalent regex with the minimal number of symbols, (a(b|c))*. Is there any efficient way to do ...
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### The best known upper bound for two-way probabilistic finite automata with one-counter

It is known that the class of languages recognized by two-way deterministic finite automata with one-counter (2D1CAs) is a proper subset of $\mathsf{L}$ (deterministic log-space): A 2D1CA can run at ...
301 views

### Proof assistant formalizations of Finite Model Theory

I'm wondering if anyone knows of a formalization (even limited) of any part of finite model theory in any of the major proof assistants. (I'm most familiar with Coq, but Isabelle, Agda, etc. would ...
296 views

### Pseudorandom functions in ACC^0?

In the lower bound result by Ryan Williams (Non-uniform $\mathsf{ACC}$ circuit lower bounds), there is a mention of "little evidence that Pseudorandom function generators exist in $\mathsf{ACC}^0$. Is ...
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### AC0 many-one reduction of Mod_3 to PRIMES?

Let Mod$_3$ be the language of binary strings with the sum of the bits divisible by 3, and PRIMES be the set of prime integers. In a 2001 paper A Lower Bound for Primality, Allender, Saks, and ...
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### DPLL and Lovász Local Lemma

Let $\varphi$ be a CNF formula. Suppose that each of $\varphi$'s clauses consist of exactly $t$ literals (and, moreover, all literals within one particular clause correspond to different variables). ...
Let $S_{n}(G)$, $C_{n}(G)$, $T_{n}(G)$ be the $n$-fold Strong Product, Cartesian Product and Tensor Product of a graph $G$ on $|V|$ vertices. Let the chromatic number ($\chi(G)$) and the independence ...
My question relates to bi-partite expander graphs, defined as bi-partite graphs on $n$ left vertices, $m$ right vertices, constant left-degree $k$, such that For any linear-sized subset $S$ of the ...