NP-hard sets have many hard instances

Abstract

The notion of instance complexity was introduced by Ko, Orponen, Schöning, and Watanabe [9] as a measure of the complexity of individual instances of a decision problem. Comparing instance complexity to Kolmogorov complexity, they stated the “instance complexity conjecture,” that every set not in P has p-hard instances. Whereas this conjecture is still unsettled, Buhrman and Orponen [4] showed that E-complete sets have exponentially dense hard instances, and Fortnow and Kummer [5] proved that NP-hard sets have p-hard instances unless P = NP. They left open whether the p-hard instances of NP-hard sets must be dense. In this work, we introduce a slightly weaker notion of hard instances and obtain a superpolynomial lower bound on the density of hard instances in the case of NP-hard sets. We additionally show that NP-hard sets cannot consist of hard instances only, unless P = NP. Kummer [10] proved that the class of recursive sets cannot be characterized by a respective version of the instance complexity conjecture, i.e. there exist nonrecursive sets without hard instances. We give a complete characterization of the class of recursive sets comparing the instance complexity to a relativized Kolmogorov complexity of strings. A set A is shown to be recursive iff ic$\left( {x:A} \right) \leqslant C^{K_0 \oplus A} \left( x \right)$ for almost all x. This translates to a characterization of P.

Supported in part by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Studies at the University of Kentucky, and by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), grant Mu 1226/2-1. Parts of the work done at University of Kentucky.