The complexity of Boolean formula minimization

摘要

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 Σ2P-complete and indeed appears as an open problem in Garey and Johnson (1979) [5]. The depth-2 variant was only shown to be Σ2P-complete in 1998 (Umans (1998) [13], Umans (2001) [15]) 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 Σ2P-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 Σ2P-complete under Turing reductions.