Producing a small DNF expression consistent with given data is a
classical problem in computer science that occurs in a number of forms and
has numerous applications. We consider two standard variants of this
problem. The first one is two-level logic minimization or finding a minimal
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We give improved inapproximability results for some minimization problems in the second level of the Polynomial-Time Hierarchy. Extending previous work by Umans [Uma99], we show that several variants of DNF minimization are $\Sigma_2^p$-hard to approximate to within factors of $n^{1/3-\epsilon}$ and $n^{1/2-\epsilon}$ (where the previous results achieved $n^{1/4 - \epsilon}$), ... more >>>