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On Symmetric Circuits and Fixed-Point Logics

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

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Authors

Anderson, M 

Abstract

We study properties of relational structures, such as graphs, that are decided by families of Boolean circuits. Circuits that decide such properties are necessarily invariant to permutations of the elements of the input structures. We focus on families of circuits that are symmetric, i.e., circuits whose invariance is witnessed by automorphisms of the circuit induced by the permutation of the input structure. We show that the expressive power of such families is closely tied to definability in logic. In particular, we show that the queries defined on structures by uniform families of symmetric Boolean circuits with majority gates are exactly those definable in fixed-point logic with counting. This shows that inexpressibility results in the latter logic lead to lower bounds against polynomial-size families of symmetric circuits.

Description

Keywords

Symmetric circuit, Fixed-point logic, Majority, Counting, Uniformity

Journal Title

Theory of Computing Systems

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

1432-4350
1433-0490

Volume Title

60

Publisher

Springer Nature
Sponsorship
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/H026835/1)
This research was supported by EPSRC grant EP/H026835.