Browsing by Author "Croquevielle Rendic, Luis Alberto"

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Efficient logspace classes for enumeration, counting and uniform generation
    (2019) Croquevielle Rendic, Luis Alberto; Arenas Saavedra, Marcelo Alejandro; Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Escuela de Ingeniería
    In this work, we study two simple yet general complexity classes, based on logspace Turing machines, which provide a unifying framework for efficient query evaluation in areas like information extraction and graph databases, among others. We investigate the complexity of three fundamental algorithmic problems for these classes: enumeration, counting and uniform generation of solutions, and show that they have several desirable properties in this respect. Both complexity classes are defined in terms of non-deterministic logspace transducers (NL-transducers). For the first class, we consider the case of unambiguous NL-transducers, and we prove constant delay enumeration, and both counting and uniform generation of solutions in polynomial time. For the second class, we consider unrestricted NL-transducers, and we obtain polynomial delay enumeration, approximate counting in polynomial time, and polynomial-time randomized algorithms for uniform generation. More specifically, we show that each problem in this second class admits a fully polynomial-time randomized approximation scheme (FPRAS) and a polynomial-time Las Vegas algorithm for uniform generation. Interestingly, the key idea to prove these results is to show that the fundamental problem #NFA admits an FPRAS, where #NFA is the problem of counting the number of strings of length n accepted by a non-deterministic finite automaton (NFA). While this problem is known to be #P-complete and, more precisely, SPANL-complete, it was open whether this problem admits an FPRAS. In this work, we solve this open problem, and obtain as a welcome corollary that every function in SPANL admits an FPRAS.