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This is a survey on the exact complexity of computing the Tutte polynomial. It is the longer 2017 version of Chapter 25 of the CRC Handbook on the Tutte polynomial and related topics, edited by J. Ellis-Monaghan and I. Moffatt, which is due to appear in the first quarter of 2020. In the version to be published in the Handbook the Sections 5 and 6 are shortened and made into a single section.
The complexity class PPA consists of NP-search problems which are reducible to the parity principle in undirected graphs. It contains a wide variety of interesting problems from graph theory, combinatorics, algebra and number theory, but only a few of these are known to be complete in the class. Before this work, the known complete problems were all discretizations or combinatorial analogues of topological fixed point theorems. Here we prove the PPA-completeness of two problems of radically different style. They are PPA-Circuit CNSS and PPA-Circuit Chevalley, related respectively to the Combinatorial Nullstellensatz and to the Chevalley-Warning Theorem over the two elements field GF(2). The input of these problems contain PPA-circuits which are arithmetic circuits with special symmetric properties that assure that the polynomials computed by them have always an even number of zeros. In the proof of the result we relate the multilinear degree of the polynomials to the parity of the maximal parse subcircuits that compute monomials with maximal multilinear degree, and we show that the maximal parse subcircuits of a PPA-circuit can be paired in polynomial time.
We introduce a new algebraic proof system, which has tight connections to (algebraic) circuit complexity. In particular, we show that any super-polynomial lower bound on any Boolean tautology in our proof system implies that the permanent does not have polynomial-size algebraic circuits (VNP is not equal to VP). As a corollary to the proof, we also show that super-polynomial lower bounds on the number of lines in Polynomial Calculus proofs (as opposed to the usual measure of number of monomials) imply the Permanent versus Determinant Conjecture. Note that, prior to our work, there was no proof system for which lower bounds on an arbitrary tautology implied any computational lower bound. Our proof system helps clarify the relationships between previous algebraic proof systems, and begins to shed light on why proof complexity lower bounds for various proof systems have been so much harder than lower bounds on the corresponding circuit classes. In doing so, we highlight the importance of polynomial identity testing (PIT) for understanding proof complexity. More specifically, we introduce certain propositional axioms satisfied by any Boolean circuit computing PIT. We use these PIT axioms to shed light on AC^0[p]-Frege lower bounds, which have been open for nearly 30 years, with no satisfactory explanation as to their apparent difficulty. We show that either: a) Proving super-polynomial lower bounds on AC^0[p]-Frege implies VNP does not have polynomial-size circuits of depth d - a notoriously open question for d at least 4 - thus explaining the difficulty of lower bounds on AC^0[p]-Frege, or b) AC^0[p]-Frege cannot efficiently prove the depth d PIT axioms, and hence we have a lower bound on AC^0[p]-Frege. Using the algebraic structure of our proof system, we propose a novel way to extend techniques from algebraic circuit complexity to prove lower bounds in proof complexity.
We study the multiparty communication complexity of high dimensional permutations, in the Number On the Forehead (NOF) model. This model is due to Chandra, Furst and Lipton (CFL) who also gave a nontrivial protocol for the Exactly-n problem where three players receive integer inputs and need to decide if their inputs sum to a given integer $n$. There is a considerable body of literature dealing with the same problem, where $(mathbb{N},+)$ is replaced by some other abelian group. Our work can be viewed as a far-reaching extension of this line of work. We show that the known lower bounds for that group-theoretic problem apply to all high dimensional permutations. We introduce new proof techniques that appeal to recent advances in Additive Combinatorics and Ramsey theory. We reveal new and unexpected connections between the NOF communication complexity of high dimensional permutations and a variety of well known and thoroughly studied problems in combinatorics. Previous protocols for Exactly-n all rely on the construction of large sets of integers without a 3-term arithmetic progression. No direct algorithmic protocol was previously known for the problem, and we provide the first such algorithm. This suggests new ways to significantly improve the CFL protocol. Many new open questions are presented throughout.
We prove two results that shed new light on the monotone complexity of the spanning tree polynomial, a classic polynomial in algebraic complexity and beyond. First, we show that the spanning tree polynomials having $n$ variables and defined over constant-degree expander graphs, have monotone arithmetic complexity $2^{Omega(n)}$. This yields the first strongly exponential lower bound on the monotone arithmetic circuit complexity for a polynomial in VP. Before this result, strongly exponential size monotone lower bounds were known only for explicit polynomials in VNP (Gashkov-Sergeev12, Raz-Yehudayoff11, Srinivasan20, Cavalar-Kumar-Rossman20, Hrubes-Yehudayoff21). Recently, Hrubes20 initiated a program to prove lower bounds against general arithmetic circuits by proving $epsilon$-sensitive lower bounds for monotone arithmetic circuits for a specific range of values for $epsilon in (0,1)$. We consider the spanning tree polynomial $ST_{n}$ defined over the complete graph on $n$ vertices and show that the polynomials $F_{n-1,n} - epsilon cdot ST_{n}$ and $F_{n-1,n} + epsilon cdot ST_{n}$ defined over $n^2$ variables, have monotone circuit complexity $2^{Omega(n)}$ if $epsilon geq 2^{-Omega(n)}$ and $F_{n-1,n} = prod_{i=2}^n (x_{i,1} +cdots + x_{i,n})$ is the complete set-multilinear polynomial. This provides the first $epsilon$-sensitive exponential lower bound for a family of polynomials inside VP. En-route, we consider a problem in 2-party, best partition communication complexity of deciding whether two sets of oriented edges distributed among Alice and Bob form a spanning tree or not. We prove that there exists a fixed distribution, under which the problem has low discrepancy with respect to every nearly-balanced partition. This result could be of interest beyond algebraic complexity.