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We propose models for lobbying in a probabilistic environment, in which an actor (called The Lobby) seeks to influence voters preferences of voting for or against multiple issues when the voters preferences are represented in terms of probabilities. In particular, we provide two evaluation criteria and two bribery methods to formally describe these models, and we consider the resulting forms of lobbying with and without issue weighting. We provide a formal analysis for these problems of lobbying in a stochastic environment, and determine their classical and parameterized complexity depending on the given bribery/evaluation criteria and on various natural parameterizations. Specifically, we show that some of these problems can be solved in polynomial time, some are NP-complete but fixed-parameter tractable, and some are W[2]-complete. Finally, we provide approximability and inapproximability results for these problems and several variants.
Rummikub is a tile-based game in which each player starts with a hand of $14$ tiles. A tile has a value and a suit. The players form sets consisting of tiles with the same suit and consecutive values (runs) or tiles with the same value and different suits (groups). The corresponding optimization problem is, given a hand of tiles, to form valid sets such that the score (sum of tile values) is maximized. We first present an algorithm that solves this problem in polynomial time. Next, we analyze the impact on the computational complexity when we generalize over various input parameters. Finally, we attempt to better understand some aspects involved in human play by means of an experiment that considers counting problems related to the number of possible immediately winning hands.
We study the complexity of approximating the vertex expansion of graphs $G = (V,E)$, defined as [ Phi^V := min_{S subset V} n cdot frac{|N(S)|}{|S| |V backslash S|}. ] We give a simple polynomial-time algorithm for finding a subset with vertex expansion $O(sqrt{OPT log d})$ where $d$ is the maximum degree of the graph. Our main result is an asymptotically matching lower bound: under the Small Set Expansion (SSE) hypothesis, it is hard to find a subset with expansion less than $Csqrt{OPT log d}$ for an absolute constant $C$. In particular, this implies for all constant $epsilon > 0$, it is SSE-hard to distinguish whether the vertex expansion $< epsilon$ or at least an absolute constant. The analogous threshold for edge expansion is $sqrt{OPT}$ with no dependence on the degree; thus our results suggest that vertex expansion is harder to approximate than edge expansion. In particular, while Cheegers algorithm can certify constant edge expansion, it is SSE-hard to certify constant vertex expansion in graphs. Our proof is via a reduction from the {it Unique Games} instance obtained from the SSE hypothesis to the vertex expansion problem. It involves the definition of a smoother intermediate problem we call {sf Analytic Vertex Expansion} which is representative of both the vertex expansion and the conductance of the graph. Both reductions (from the UGC instance to this problem and from this problem to vertex expansion) use novel proof ideas.
In two papers, Burgisser and Ikenmeyer (STOC 2011, STOC 2013) used an adaption of the geometric complexity theory (GCT) approach by Mulmuley and Sohoni (Siam J Comput 2001, 2008) to prove lower bounds on the border rank of the matrix multiplication tensor. A key ingredient was information about certain Kronecker coefficients. While tensors are an interesting test bed for GCT ideas, the far-away goal is the separation of algebraic complexity classes. The role of the Kronecker coefficients in that setting is taken by the so-called plethysm coefficients: These are the multiplicities in the coordinate rings of spaces of polynomials. Even though several hardness results for Kronecker coefficients are known, there are almost no results about the complexity of computing the plethysm coefficients or even deciding their positivity. In this paper we show that deciding positivity of plethysm coefficients is NP-hard, and that computing plethysm coefficients is #P-hard. In fact, both problems remain hard even if the inner parameter of the plethysm coefficient is fixed. In this way we obtain an inner versus outer contrast: If the outer parameter of the plethysm coefficient is fixed, then the plethysm coefficient can be computed in polynomial time. Moreover, we derive new lower and upper bounds and in special cases even combinatorial descriptions for plethysm coefficients, which we consider to be of independent interest. Our technique uses discrete tomography in a more refined way than the recent work on Kronecker coefficients by Ikenmeyer, Mulmuley, and Walter (Comput Compl 2017). This makes our work the first to apply techniques from discrete tomography to the study of plethysm coefficients. Quite surprisingly, that interpretation also leads to new equalities between certain plethysm coefficients and Kronecker coefficients.
The method of partial derivatives is one of the most successful lower bound methods for arithmetic circuits. It uses as a complexity measure the dimension of the span of the partial derivatives of a polynomial. In this paper, we consider this complexity measure as a computational problem: for an input polynomial given as the sum of its nonzero monomials, what is the complexity of computing the dimension of its space of partial derivatives? We show that this problem is #P-hard and we ask whether it belongs to #P. We analyze the trace method, recently used in combinatorics and in algebraic complexity to lower bound the rank of certain matrices. We show that this method provides a polynomial-time computable lower bound on the dimension of the span of partial derivatives, and from this method we derive closed-form lower bounds. We leave as an open problem the existence of an approximation algorithm with reasonable performance guarantees.A slightly shorter version of this paper was presented at STACS17. In this new version we have corrected a typo in Section 4.1, and added a reference to Shitovs work on tensor rank.
Detecting and eliminating logic hazards in Boolean circuits is a fundamental problem in logic circuit design. We show that there is no $O(3^{(1-epsilon)n} text{poly}(s))$ time algorithm, for any $epsilon > 0$, that detects logic hazards in Boolean circuits of size $s$ on $n$ variables under the assumption that the strong exponential time hypothesis is true. This lower bound holds even when the input circuits are restricted to be formulas of depth four. We also present a polynomial time algorithm for detecting $1$-hazards in DNF (or, $0$-hazards in CNF) formulas. Since $0$-hazards in DNF (or, $1$-hazards in CNF) formulas are easy to eliminate, this algorithm can be used to detect whether a given DNF or CNF formula has a hazard in practice.