Theoretical computer science treats any computational subject for which a good model can be created. Research on formal models of computation was initiated in the 1930s and 1940s by Turing, Post, Kleene, Church, and others. In the 1950s and 1960s programming languages, language translators, and operating systems were under development and therefore became both the subject and basis for a great deal of theoretical work. The power of computers of this period was limited by slow processors and small amounts of memory, and thus theories (models, algorithms, and analysis) were developed to explore the efficient use of computers as well as the inherent complexity of problems. The former subject is known today as algorithms and data structures, the latter computational complexity. The focus of theoretical computer scientists in the 1960s on languages is reflected in the first textbook on the subject, Formal Languages and Their Relation to Automata by John Hopcroft and Jeffrey Ullman. This influential book led to the creation of many languagecentered theoretical computer science courses; many introductory theory courses today continue to reflect the content of this book and the interests of theoreticians of the 1960s and early 1970s. Although

Abstract. Optimal Q(logn/log logn) lower bounds on the time for CRCW PRAMS with polynomially bounded numbers of processors or memory cells to compute parity and a number of related problems are proven. A strict time hierarchy of explicit Boolean functions of n bits on such machines that holds up to O(logn/loglogn) time is also exhibited. That is, for every time bound T within this range a function is exhibited that can be easily computed using polynomial resources in time T but requires more than polynomial resources to be computed in time T- 1. Finally, it is shown that almost all Boolean functions of n bits require logn- loglogn + fi ( 1) time when the number of processors is at most polynomial in n. The bounds do not place restrictions on the uniformity of the algorithms nor on the instruction sets of the machines.

We study the question of provability of lower bounds on the complexity of explicitly given Boolean functions in weak fragments of Peano Arithmetic. To that end, we analyze what is the right fragment capturing the kind of techniques existing in Boolean complexity at present. We give both formal and informal arguments supporting the claim that a conceivable answer is V 1 (which, in view of RSUV -isomorphism, is equivalent to S 2 ), although some major results about the complexity of Boolean functions can be proved in (presumably) weaker subsystems like U 1 . As a by-product of this analysis, we give a more constructive version of the proof of Hastad Switching Lemma which probably is interesting in its own right.

Given a successor relation S (i.e., a directed line graph), and given two distinguished points s and t, the problem ORD is to determine whether s precedes t in the unique ordering defined by S. We show that ORD is L-complete (via quantifier-free projections). We then show that first-order logic with counting quantifiers, a logic that captures TC 0 ([BIS90]) over structures with a built-in total-ordering, can not express ORD. Our original proof of this in the conference version of this paper ([Ete95]) employed an Ehrenfeucht-Fraiss'e Game for first-order logic with counting ([IL90]). Here we show how the result follows from a more general one obtained independently by Nurmonen, [Nur96]. We then show that an appropriately modified version of the EF game is "complete" for the logic with counting in the sense that it provides a necessary and sufficient condition for expressibility in the logic. We observe that the L-complete problem ORD is essentially sparse if we ignore reorderings of v...

We provide new techniques for the analysis of the expressive power of query languages for nested collections. These languages may use set or bag semantics and may be further complicated by the presence of aggregate functions. We exhibit certain classes of graphs and prove that the properties of these graphs that can be tested in such languages are either finite or cofinite. This result settles the conjectures of Grumbach, Milo, and Paredaens that parity test, transitive closure, and balanced binary tree test are not expressible in bag languages like the PTIME fragment of BALG of Grumbach and Milo and BQL of Libkin and Wong. Moreover, it implies that many recursive queries, including simple ones like the test for a chain, cannot be expressed in a nested relational language even when aggregate functions are available. In an attempt to generalize the finite-cofiniteness result, we study the bounded degree property which says that the number of distinct in- and out-degrees in the output of...

this article, I have attempted to organize and describe this literature, including an occasional opinion about the most fruitful directions, but no technical details. In the first half of this century, work on the power of formal systems led to the formalization of the notion of algorithm and the realization that certain problems are algorithmically unsolvable. At around this time, forerunners of the programmable computing machine were beginning to appear. As mathematicians contemplated the practical capabilities and limitations of such devices, computational complexity theory emerged from the theory of algorithmic unsolvability. Early on, a particular type of computational task became evident, where one is seeking an object which lies

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. Starting with the paper of Baker, Gill and Solovay [BGS 75] in complexity theory, many results have been proved which separate certain relativized complexity classes or show that they have no complete language. All results of this kind were, in fact, based on lower bounds for boolean decision trees of a certain type or for machines with polylogarithmic restrictions on time. The following question arises: Are these methods of proving "relativized" results universal? In the first part of the present paper we propose a general framework in which assertions of universality of this kind may be formulated and proved as convenient criteria. Using these criteria we obtain, as easy consequences of the known results on boolean decision trees, some new "relativized" results and new proofs of some known results. In the second part of the present paper we apply these general criteria to many particular cases. For example, for many of the complexity classes studied in the literature all relativiza...

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Several researchers, including Leonid Levin, Gerard 't Hooft, and Stephen Wolfram, have argued that quantum mechanics will break down before the factoring of large numbers becomes possible. If this is true, then there should be a natural "Sure/Shor separator"---that is, a set of quantum states that can account for all experiments performed to date, but not for Shor's factoring algorithm. We propose as a candidate the set of states expressible by a polynomial number of additions and tensor products. Using a recent lower bound on multilinear formula size due to Raz, we then show that states arising in quantum error-correction require n## additions and tensor products even to approximate, which incidentally yields the first superpolynomial gap between general and multilinear formula size of functions. More broadly, we introduce a complexity classification of pure quantum states, and prove many basic facts about this classification. Our goal is to refine vague ideas about a breakdown of quantum mechanics into specific hypotheses that might be experimentally testable in the near future.