On the Ultimate Complexity of Factorials

  • Authors:
  • Qi Cheng

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • STACS '03 Proceedings of the 20th Annual Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science
  • Year:
  • 2003

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

It has long been observed that certain factorization algorithms provide a way to write product of a lot of integers succinctly. In this paper, we study the problem of representing the product of all integers from 1 to n (n!) by straight-line programs. Formally, we say that a sequence of integers an is ultimately f(n)-computable, if there exists a nonzero integer sequence mn such that for any n, anmn can be computed by a straight-line program (using only additions, subtractions and multiplications) of length at most f(n). Shub and Smale [12] showed that if n! is ultimately hard to compute, then algebraic version of NP 驴 P is true. Assuming a widely believed number theory conjecture concerning smooth numbers in short interval, a subexponential upper bound (exp(c驴log n log log n)) for the ultimate complexity of n! is proved in this paper, and a random subexponential algorithm constructing such a short straight-line program is presented as well.