Abstract
The Minimum Equivalent Expression problem is a natural optimization problem in the second level of the Polynomial-Time Hierarchy. It has long been conjectured to be \(\Sigma_2^P\)-complete and indeed appears as an open problem in Garey and Johnson [GJ79]. The depth-2 variant was only shown to be \(\Sigma_2^P\)-complete in 1998 [Uma98], and even resolving the complexity of the depth-3 version has been mentioned as a challenging open problem. We prove that the depth-k version is \(\Sigma_2^P\)-complete under Turing reductions for all k ≥ 3. We also settle the complexity of the original, unbounded depth Minimum Equivalent Expression problem, by showing that it too is \(\Sigma_2^P\)-complete under Turing reductions.
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Buchfuhrer, D., Umans, C. (2008). The Complexity of Boolean Formula Minimization. In: Aceto, L., Damgård, I., Goldberg, L.A., Halldórsson, M.M., Ingólfsdóttir, A., Walukiewicz, I. (eds) Automata, Languages and Programming. ICALP 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5125. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-70575-8_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-70575-8_3
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