License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (CC BY 3.0)
When quoting this document, please refer to the following
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.CCC.2020.22
URN: urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-125744
URL: http://dagstuhl.sunsite.rwth-aachen.de/volltexte/2020/12574/
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Ilango, Rahul ; Loff, Bruno ; Oliveira, Igor C.

NP-Hardness of Circuit Minimization for Multi-Output Functions

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LIPIcs-CCC-2020-22.pdf (0.7 MB)

Abstract

Can we design efficient algorithms for finding fast algorithms? This question is captured by various circuit minimization problems, and algorithms for the corresponding tasks have significant practical applications. Following the work of Cook and Levin in the early 1970s, a central question is whether minimizing the circuit size of an explicitly given function is NP-complete. While this is known to hold in restricted models such as DNFs, making progress with respect to more expressive classes of circuits has been elusive.
In this work, we establish the first NP-hardness result for circuit minimization of total functions in the setting of general (unrestricted) Boolean circuits. More precisely, we show that computing the minimum circuit size of a given multi-output Boolean function f : {0,1}^n → {0,1}^m is NP-hard under many-one polynomial-time randomized reductions. Our argument builds on a simpler NP-hardness proof for the circuit minimization problem for (single-output) Boolean functions under an extended set of generators.
Complementing these results, we investigate the computational hardness of minimizing communication. We establish that several variants of this problem are NP-hard under deterministic reductions. In particular, unless ? = ??, no polynomial-time computable function can approximate the deterministic two-party communication complexity of a partial Boolean function up to a polynomial. This has consequences for the class of structural results that one might hope to show about the communication complexity of partial functions.

BibTeX - Entry

@InProceedings{ilango_et_al:LIPIcs:2020:12574,
  author =	{Rahul Ilango and Bruno Loff and Igor C. Oliveira},
  title =	{{NP-Hardness of Circuit Minimization for Multi-Output Functions}},
  booktitle =	{35th Computational Complexity Conference (CCC 2020)},
  pages =	{22:1--22:36},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-156-6},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2020},
  volume =	{169},
  editor =	{Shubhangi Saraf},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl--Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2020/12574},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-125744},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.CCC.2020.22},
  annote =	{Keywords: MCSP, circuit minimization, communication complexity, Boolean circuit}
}

Keywords: MCSP, circuit minimization, communication complexity, Boolean circuit
Collection: 35th Computational Complexity Conference (CCC 2020)
Issue Date: 2020
Date of publication: 17.07.2020

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