Finding exact circuit size is a notorious optimization problem in practice. Whereas modern computers and algorithmic techniques allow to find a circuit of size seven in blink of an eye, it may take more than a week to search for a circuit of size thirteen. One of the reasons of ... more >>>

Let $A \in \{0,1\}^{n \times n}$ be a matrix with $z$ zeroes and $u$ ones and $x$ be an $n$-dimensional vector of formal variables over a semigroup $(S, \circ)$. How many semigroup operations are required to compute the linear operator $Ax$?

As we observe in this paper, this problem contains ... more >>>

The best known circuit lower bounds against unrestricted circuits remained around $3n$ for several decades. Moreover, the only known technique for proving lower bounds in this model, gate elimination, is inherently limited to proving lower bounds of less than $5n$. In this work, we suggest a first non-gate-elimination approach for ... more >>>

We study the following computational problem: for which values of $k$, the majority of $n$ bits $\text{MAJ}_n$ can be computed with a depth two formula whose each gate computes a majority function of at most $k$ bits? The corresponding computational model is denoted by $\text{MAJ}_k \circ \text{MAJ}_k$. We observe that ... more >>>

Although a simple counting argument shows the existence of Boolean functions of exponential circuit complexity, proving superlinear circuit lower bounds for explicit functions seems to be out of reach of the current techniques. There has been a (very slow) progress in proving linear lower bounds with the latest record of ... more >>>

Most of the known lower bounds for binary Boolean circuits with unrestricted depth are proved by the gate elimination method. The most efficient known algorithms for the #SAT problem on binary Boolean circuits use similar case analyses to the ones in gate elimination. Chen and Kabanets recently showed that the ... more >>>

In this paper we motivate the study of Boolean dispersers for quadratic varieties by showing that an explicit construction of such objects gives improved circuit lower bounds. An $(n,k,s)$-quadratic disperser is a function on $n$ variables that is not constant on any subset of $\mathbb{F}_2^n$ of size at least $s$ ... more >>>

We consider Boolean circuits over the full binary basis. We prove a $(3+\frac{1}{86})n-o(n)$ lower bound on the size of such a circuit for an explicitly defined predicate, namely an affine disperser for sublinear dimension. This improves the $3n-o(n)$ bound of Norbert Blum (1984). The proof is based on the gate ... more >>>

A Boolean function $f \colon \mathbb{F}^n_2 \rightarrow \mathbb{F}_2$ is called an affine disperser for sources of dimension $d$, if $f$ is not constant on any affine subspace of $\mathbb{F}^n_2$ of dimension at least $d$. Recently Ben-Sasson and Kopparty gave an explicit construction of an affine disperser for $d=o(n)$. The main ... more >>>

Khrapchenko's classical lower bound $n^2$ on the formula size of the
parity function~$f$ can be interpreted as designing a suitable
measure of subrectangles of the combinatorial rectangle
$f^{-1}(0)\times f^{-1}(1)$. Trying to generalize this approach we
arrived at the concept of \emph{convex measures}. We prove the
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