Abstract
We prove that the height of any algebraic computation tree for deciding membership in a semialgebraic set \(\Sigma \subset {\mathbb R}^n\) is bounded from below by
where \(\mathrm{b}_m(\Sigma )\) is the mth Betti number of \(\Sigma \) with respect to “ordinary” (singular) homology and \(c_1,\ c_2\) are some (absolute) positive constants. This result complements the well-known lower bound by Yao (J Comput Syst Sci 55:36–43, 1997) for locally closed semialgebraic sets in terms of the total Borel–Moore Betti number. We also prove that if \(\rho :\> {\mathbb R}^n \rightarrow {\mathbb R}^{n-r}\) is the projection map, then the height of any tree deciding membership in \(\Sigma \) is bounded from below by
for some positive constants \(c_1,\ c_2\). We illustrate these general results by examples of lower complexity bounds for some specific computational problems.
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Acknowledgments
Andrei Gabrielov was partially supported by NSF Grant DMS-1161629.
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Communicated by Felipe Cucker.
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Gabrielov, A., Vorobjov, N. On Topological Lower Bounds for Algebraic Computation Trees. Found Comput Math 17, 61–72 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10208-015-9283-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10208-015-9283-7