Abstract

This work is settled in the area of complexity theory for restricted variants of branching programs. Today, branching programs can be considered one of the standard nonuniform models of computation. One reason for their popularity is that they allow to describe computations in an intuitively straightforward way and promise to be easier to analyze than the traditional models. In complexity theory, we are mainly interested in upper and lower bounds on the size of branching programs. Although proving superpolynomial lower bounds on the size of general branching programs still remains a challenging open problem, there has been considerable success in the study of lower bound techniques for various restricted variants, most notably perhaps read-once branching programs and OBDDs (ordered binary decision diagrams). Surprisingly, OBDDs have also turned out to be extremely useful in practical applications as a data structure for Boolean functions. So far, research has concentrated on determinis...

Citations