Recent progress on the VP vs VNP problem
Speaker: PrashanthTitle: Recent progress on the VP vs VNP problem
Date: 27 Oct 2022 17:30-19:00 EST
Location: SEC Level 3 NW Terrace
Food: Indian
Is every polynomial that is easy to describe also easy to compute? I will begin this talk by giving a brief introduction to algebraic complexity theory and the VP vs VNP problem. Then we will discuss a recent result that gives superpolynomial lower bounds against constant-depth algebraic circuits (FOCS ‘21 best paper). This is analogous to the AC^0 lower bound of Hastad, but the proof approach is quite different (and simpler!). I will first present the lower bound for a toy model of depth-3 circuits and then make some modifications to get lower bounds for depth-5 (or in fact, any constant-depth) circuits. Link to the paper: https://eccc.weizmann.ac.il/report/2021/081/revision/1/download/