Weak completeness notions for exponential time

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In the present paper, the authors investigate reduction notions that can be employed in the context of linear exponential time (E). It is well known that the complexity class E is not closed under polynomial many-to-one reductions (Lemma 1) through a padding argument. Because of that, \textit{J. H. Lutz} [SIAM J. Comput. 24, No. 6, 1170--1189 (1995; Zbl 0845.68048)] formalised in a way a type of measure for that class. The authors introduce two weak hardness notions for E, namely, (strong) E-nontriviality. Intuitively, a subclass of E is negligible if it is contained in some \(\mathrm{E}_k= \mathrm{DTIME}(2^{kn})\) in the exponential-time hierarchy. Arguing that ``E-nontriviality is the most general weak hardness notion for E, the authors stress that it ``generalised E-hardness and implies intractability but that it also reflects the internal, hierarchical structure of E hence considers finite parts of the linear exponential time hierarchy to be negligible. The strong variant of this concept lies strictly between the weak notion and the ones of measure- and category-hardnesses. The authors give a verbose overview of the sections in the introduction and motivate quite well. Section 2 then handles the new central notions and Lemma 3 is an important result showing how meaningful their approach is. Theorem 1 characterises the strong variant via \(\mathrm{E}_1\)-bi-immune sets (a set \(A\) is \(C\)-bi-immune for a class \(C\) if there is no infinite \(B\in C\) such that \(B\subseteq A\) or \(B\cap A=\emptyset\)). Section 3 provides then some examples. First, the existence of an E-trivial set in \(\mathrm{E}\setminus \mathrm{P}\) (Theorem 2), but also E-trivial sets in arbitrarily high levels \(\mathrm{E}\setminus \mathrm{E}_k\) of the E-hierarchy (Theorem 4). Section 4 considers sparse and tally sets in this context. The authors show the existence of an E-category-complete set which is sparse and that no such set is tally (Theorem 8). Yet, there are tally sets which are strongly E-nontrivial (Theorem 9). The authors show the context when tally sets are E-nontrivial (Theorem 10) and when even an E-nontrivial set is exptally (Corollary 2) which is also not strongly E-nontrivial (Corollary 3). Theorem 13 then gives the context for a set \(A\) to be E-hard, E-measure-hard, E-category-hard, strongly E-nontrivial, E-nontrivial, and intractable (in this order). Section 5 talks about information content. Can one, from splitting ``a weakly complete set \(A\) into two parts \(A_0\) and \(A_1\), deduce weak completeness for either of them? The authors show that this is true for E-nontriviality but for the remainder of the weak completeness notions this is false.











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