이론적 인 컴퓨터 과학에 반 직관적 인 결과가 있습니까?


30

일부 수학 및 논리 역설은 컴퓨터에 자동으로 적용될 수 있지만 컴퓨터 과학 자체에서 발견 된 역설이 있습니까?

역설적으로 나는 모순처럼 보이는 직관적 인 결과를 반대하는 것을 의미합니다.


2
역설이나 실제 불일치가있는 것 (예 : Russell의 역설)을 찾고 있습니까?
Raphael

2
이 질문에 적합한 태그를 모릅니다. [big-picture] 또는 [soft-question] 일 수 있습니다. 우리가 언급 한 수학 역설의 예를 들어 당신이 무엇을 말하는지 알 수 있습니까?
Kaveh

2
분명히, 컴퓨터 과학에는 알려진 불일치가 없으며 걱정할 것입니다. 반 직관적 인 결과를 찾고 있습니까? PCP 정리, Kleene의 재귀 정리 및 공개 키 암호화 시스템과 같은 결과가 당신에게 역설로 간주하기에 기괴한가?
토마스

4
@ serg, 당신의 질문을 명확히하기 위해 대답 할 수 있다면 정말 도움이 될 것입니다. 토마스가 제안한 매우 "부드러운"의미에서 질문을 의미합니다.이 경우 질문에 큰 그림으로 올바르게 태그가 지정되고 아래의 답변이 주제와 맞지 않거나 다소 기술적 인 의미 ( "응용 프로그램 및 컴퓨터 과학에서 논리적 역설의 영향 ")이 경우 귀하의 질문은 큰 그림이 아닌 lo.logic으로 태그되어야합니다. 아니면 당신은 우리가 4 명의 주석가가 추측하지 않은 다른 것을 의미합니다!
Rob Simmons

4
반 직관성은 시간의 함수입니다. 채널이 Shannon보다 전에 명확한 정보 용량을 가지고 있다는 사실과 마찬가지로, 많은 다른 질문들이 모두 NP- 완료라는 것은 Karp의 논문 이전에 의심 할 여지없이 반 직관적이었습니다. 그러나 이제는 사람들이 이러한 결과에 익숙합니다.
피터 쇼어

답변:


28

네트워크 흐름이 다항식 시간 카운터 직관적이라는 사실을 알았습니다. 많은 NP-Hard 문제보다 첫눈에 훨씬 어렵습니다. 또는 다르게 말하면 CS에는 결과를 해결하는 데 필요한 실행 시간이 예상보다 훨씬 좋은 결과가 많이 있습니다.


6
ditto: I've had students comment on the non-intuitveness of network flow, and even the fact that matchings can be done in poly time seems highly surprising.
Suresh Venkat

9
I don't quite agree. Network flow can be easily reduced to linear programming so you are claiming that linear programming being in P is counterintuitive. Perhaps. But duality shows that LP is in NP and co-NP which at least suggests that it may not be that hard. What is less intuitive is that min-cut is solvable in P because it is not naturally a "fractional" problem.
Chandra Chekuri

21

A family of counter-intuitive results is the whole "prove an upper bound to prove a lower bound" family of results. The Meyer result that P=NP implies EXPP/poly is one example of this, and this came to my mind from both Ketan Mulmuley's GCT work as well as Ryan Williams' recent result that again used an upper bound for CIRCUIT-SAT to prove a lower bound for NEXP in terms of ACC.


Suresh, Please provide reference to Meyer's result.
Mohammad Al-Turkistany

1
I don't know if there's a direct reference. The Karp-Lipton paper (faculty.cs.tamu.edu/chen/courses/637/2008/pres/ashraf.pdf) credits Meyer with this result, but there's no citation.
Suresh Venkat

20

SAT has a polynomial-time algorithm only if P=NP. We don't know whether P=NP. However, I can write down an algorithm for SAT which is polynomial-time if P=NP is true. I don't know the correct reference for this, but the wikipedia page gives such an algorithm and credits Levin.


5
Similarly, we have a provably optimal algorithm for factoring that runs in polynomial time if factoring is in P, yet we do not know if factoring is in P (or how to analyze the runtime of this optimal function).
Ross Snider

9
This is typically referred to as "Levin universal search," and the correct reference is: L. Levin, Universal enumeration problems. Problems of Information Transmission, 9(3):265--266, 1973 (translated from Russian). This is the same paper in which Levin introduced NP-completeness (see also Cook & Karp, but as far as I know neither of them introduced the notion of an optimal universal search algorithm). The English translation can be found in Trakhtenbrot's famous survey: doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MAHC.1984.10036
Joshua Grochow

18

Computability certainly screws most students. A beautiful example with high confusion rate is this:

f(n):={1,π has 0n in its decimals0,else

Is f computable?

The answer is yes; see a discussion here. Most people immediately try constructing f with present knowledge. That can not work and leads to a perceived paradox which is really just subtleness.


7
This to me seems like one of those problems where all of its trickiness is in how it's stated. This reminds me a bit of taking an algorithm, fiating that n is some constant and proclaiming that the algorithm now runs in constant time. The hard question people will typically think you're asking is whether we can write a program that will either prove pi contains a 0^n string for all n or that will determine the largest n for which it is true.
Joseph Garvin

4
Sure, but the fact they think like that does not illustrate trickiness the function's formulation but that people do not understand the difference between existence and construction.
Raphael

18

One surprising and counter intuitive result is that IP=PSPACE, proved using arithmetization around 1990.

As Arora & Barak put it (p. 157) "We know that interaction alone does not give us any languages outside NP. We also suspect that randomization alone does not add significant power to computation. So how much power could the combination of randomization and interaction provide?"

Apparently quite a bit!


13

As Philip said, Rice's theorem is a good example: one's intuition before studying computability is that there must surely be something we can compute about computations. It turns out that we can only compute something about some computations.



12

The Recursion Theorem certainly seems counter-intuitive the first time you see it. Essentially it says that when you are describing a Turing Machine, you can assume it has access to its own description. In other words, I can build Turing Machines like:

TM M accepts n iff n is a multiple of the number of times "1" appears in the string representation of M.

TM N takes in a number n and outputs n copies of itself.

Note that the "string representation" here is not referring to the informal text description, but rather an encoding.


11

Proving information-theoretic results based on complexity-theoretic assumptions is another counter-intuitive result. For instance, Bellare et al. in their paper The (True) Complexity of Statistical Zero Knowledge constructively proved that, under the certified discrete log assumption, any language that admits honest-verifier statistical zero knowledge also admits statistical zero knowledge.

The result was so odd that it surprise the authors. They pointed out this fact several times; for instance, in the introduction:

Given that statistical zero-knowledge is a computationally independent notion, it is somewhat strange that properties about it could be proved under a computational intractability assumption.

PS: A stronger result was later proved unconditionally by Okamoto (On Relationships between Statistical Zero-Knowledge Proofs).

Description of some terms

Since the above result includes a lot of cryptographic jargon, I try to informally define each term.

  1. Certified discrete log assumption: It is hard (for poly-size circuits) to solve the discrete logarithm, even if the group prime (p) is certified; that is, the factorization of p1 is given.
  2. Zero knowledge: A protocol which yields no knowledge to polynomial-time bounded parties.
  3. Statistical zero knowledge: A protocol which yields no information, even to computationally unbounded parties, except with negligible probability.
  4. Honest-verifier zero knowledge: A protocol which yields no knowledge to polynomial-time bounded parties, if they act as specified by protocol.

11

How about the fact that computing permanent is #P-Complete but computing determinant - a way weirder operation happens to be in the class NC?

This seems rather strange - it did not have to be that way (or maybe it did ;-) )


7

The linear programming problem is solvable in (weakly) polynomial time. This seems very surprising: why would we be able to find one among an exponential number of vertices of a high-dimensional polytope? Why would we be able to solve a problem which is so ridiculously expressive?

Not to mention all the exponential-size linear programs which we can solved by using the ellipsoid method and separation oracles, and other methods (adding variables, etc.). For example, it's amazing that an LP with an exponential number of variables such as the Karmakar-Karp relaxation of Bin Packing can be efficiently approximated.


2
The fact that there are exponential number of solutions is not unique to LP. Most discrete optimization problems have the same feature but they have poly-time algorithms, no? LP is a special case of convex optimization where a local optimum is a global optimum. We can also solve convex optimization modulo an epsilon issue due to irrationality and other technical reasons. For LP, due to the combinatorial structure, one can jump from this small error solution to a vertex which gives an exact solution. Equivalence of separation and optimization is surprising though.
Chandra Chekuri

2
@ChandraChekuri what I had in mind is that a high-dimensional geometric search problem sounds like it should be hard..but of course there are also good reasons why it's not (convexity). I should probably emphasize the equivalence of separation and optimization instead. Plenty of surprising consequences there, like solving hard optimization problems on perfect graphs, for example.
Sasho Nikolov

3

Whenever I teach automata, I always ask my students if they find it surprising that nondeterminism doesn't add any power to finite-state automata (i.e., that for every NFA is there is an equivalent -- possibly much larger -- DFA). About half the class reports being surprised, so there you go. [I myself have lost the "feel" for what is surprising at the intro level.]

Students definitely find it surprising at first that RRE. I challenge them to produce an algorithm that determines whether a given java program will halt, and they typically try to search for endless while loops. As soon as I show them ways of constructing loops whose termination is far from obvious, the surprise factor goes away.


당사 사이트를 사용함과 동시에 당사의 쿠키 정책개인정보 보호정책을 읽고 이해하였음을 인정하는 것으로 간주합니다.
Licensed under cc by-sa 3.0 with attribution required.