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Negation-Limited Complexity of Parity and Inverters

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Abstract

In negation-limited complexity, one considers circuits with a limited number of NOT gates, being motivated by the gap in our understanding of monotone versus general circuit complexity, and hoping to better understand the power of NOT gates. We give improved lower bounds for the size (the number of AND/OR/NOT) of negation-limited circuits computing Parity and for the size of negation-limited inverters. An inverter is a circuit with inputs x 1,…,x n and outputs ¬ x 1,…,¬ x n . We show that: (a) for n=2r−1, circuits computing Parity with r−1 NOT gates have size at least 6n−log 2(n+1)−O(1), and (b) for n=2r−1, inverters with r NOT gates have size at least 8n−log 2(n+1)−O(1). We derive our bounds above by considering the minimum size of a circuit with at most r NOT gates that computes Parity for sorted inputs x 1≥⋅⋅⋅≥x n . For an arbitrary r, we completely determine the minimum size. It is 2n−r−2 for odd n and 2n−r−1 for even n for ⌈log 2(n+1)⌉−1≤r≤n/2, and it is ⌊3n/2⌋−1 for r≥n/2. We also determine the minimum size of an inverter for sorted inputs with at most r NOT gates. It is 4n−3r for ⌈log 2(n+1)⌉≤r≤n. In particular, the negation-limited inverter for sorted inputs due to Fischer, which is a core component in all the known constructions of negation-limited inverters, is shown to have the minimum possible size. Our fairly simple lower bound proofs use gate elimination arguments in a somewhat novel way.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, Yoshida Honmachi, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto, 606-8501, Japan

    Kazuo Iwama & Hiroki Morizumi

  2. Department of Information and Communication Engineering, University of Electro-Communications, Chofu, Tokyo, 182-8585, Japan

    Jun Tarui

Authors
  1. Kazuo Iwama
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  2. Hiroki Morizumi
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  3. Jun Tarui
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Correspondence to Hiroki Morizumi.

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Iwama, K., Morizumi, H. & Tarui, J. Negation-Limited Complexity of Parity and Inverters. Algorithmica 54, 256–267 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00453-007-9135-1

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