Abstract

. The first result concerns branching programs having width (log n) O(1) . We give an \Omega\Gamma n log n= log log n) lower bound for the size of such branching programs computing almost any symmetric Boolean function and in particular the following explicit function: "the sum of the input variables is a quadratic residue mod p" where p is any given prime between n 1=4 and n 1=3 . This is a strengthening of previous nonlinear lower bounds obtained by Chandra, Furst, Lipton and by Pudl'ak. We mention that by iterating our method the result can be further strengthened to \Omega\Gamma n log n). The second result is a C n lower bound for read-once-only branching programs computing an explicit Boolean function. For n = \Gamma v 2 \Delta , the function computes the parity of the number of triangles in a graph on v vertices. This improves previous exp(c p n) lower bounds for other graph functions by Wegener and Z'ak. The result implies a linear lower bound for the space comp...

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