VPSPACE and a Transfer Theorem over the Reals

  • Authors:
  • Pascal Koiran;Sylvain Perifel

  • Affiliations:
  • Université de Lyon, (UMR 5668 ENS Lyon, CNRS, UCBL, INRIA), LIP, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, Lyon, France;Université de Lyon, (UMR 5668 ENS Lyon, CNRS, UCBL, INRIA), LIP, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, Lyon, France

  • Venue:
  • Computational Complexity
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

We introduce a new class VPSPACE of families of polynomials. Roughly speaking, a family of polynomials is in VPSPACE if its coefficients can be computed in polynomial space. Our main theorem is that if (uniform, constant-free) VPSPACE families can be evaluated efficiently then the class $$\sf {PAR}_{\mathbb {R}}$$of decision problems that can be solved in parallel polynomial time over the real numbers collapses to $$\sf{P}_{\mathbb {R}}$$. As a result, one must first be able to show that there are VPSPACE families which are hard to evaluate in order to separate $$\sf{P}_{\mathbb {R}}$$from $$\sf{NP}_{\mathbb {R}}$$, or even from $$\sf{PAR}_{\mathbb {R}}$$.