Space-Optimal Quasi-Gray Codes with Logarithmic Read Complexity

A quasi-Gray code of dimension n and length l over an alphabet Sigma is a sequence of distinct words w_1,w_2,...,w_l from Sigma^n such that any two consecutive words differ in at most c coordinates, for some fixed constant c>0. In this paper we are interested in the read and write complexity of quasi-Gray codes in the bit-probe model, where we measure the number of symbols read and written in order to transform any word w_i into its successor w_{i+1}. We present construction of quasi-Gray codes of dimension n and length 3^n over the ternary alphabet {0,1,2} with worst-case read complexity O(log n) and write complexity 2. This generalizes to arbitrary odd-size alphabets. For the binary alphabet, we present quasi-Gray codes of dimension n and length at least 2^n - 20n with worst-case read complexity 6+log n and write complexity 2. This complements a recent result by Raskin [Raskin \u2717] who shows that any quasi-Gray code over binary alphabet of length 2^n has read complexity Omega(n). Our results significantly improve on previously known constructions and for the odd-size alphabets we break the Omega(n) worst-case barrier for space-optimal (non-redundant) quasi-Gray codes with constant number of writes. We obtain our results via a novel application of algebraic tools together with the principles of catalytic computation [Buhrman et al. \u2714, Ben-Or and Cleve \u2792, Barrington \u2789, Coppersmith and Grossman \u2775]