Malign Distributions for Average Case Circuit Complexity

AbstractIn contrast to machine models like Turing machines or random access machines, circuits are a static computational model. The internal information flow of a computation is fixed in advance, independent of the actual input. Therefore, size and depth are natural and simple measures for circuits and provide a worst-case analysis. We consider a new model in which an internal gate is evaluated as soon as its result has been determined by a partial assignment of its inputs. This way, a dynamic notion of delay is obtained which gives rise to an average case measure for the time complexity of circuits. In a previous paper we have obtained tight upper and lower bounds for the average case complexity of several basic Boolean functions. This paper examines the asymptotic average case complexity for the set of alln-ary Boolean functions. In contrast to worst case analysis a simple counting argument does not work. We prove that with respect to the uniform probability distribution almost all Boolean functions require at leastn−logn−loglognexpected time. On the other hand, there is a significantly large subset of functions that can be computed with a constant average delay. Finally, for an arbitrary Boolean function we compare its worst case and average case complexity. It is shown that for each function that requires circuit depthd, i.e. of worst-case complexityd, the expected time complexity will be at leastd−logn−logdwith respect to an explicitly defined probability distribution. In addition, a nontrivial upper bound on the complexity of such a distribution will be obtained