Using Duality in Circuit Complexity

TL;DR

This paper develops a method using duality and the block product to derive equations for non-regular language classes, enabling separation results for circuit complexity classes.

Contribution

It extends the block product to non-regular languages and demonstrates how to derive equations for circuit classes from gate-type equations.

Findings

Derived equations for languages recognized by circuit families with constant gates

Extended the block product to non-regular language classes

Provided a method to find equations inductively for circuit complexity

Abstract

We investigate in a method for proving separation results for abstract classes of languages. A well established method to characterize varieties of regular languages are identities. We use a recently established generalization of these identities to non-regular languages by Gehrke, Grigorieff, and Pin: so called equations, which are capable of describing arbitrary Boolean algebras of languages. While the main concern of their result is the existence of these equations, we investigate in a general method that could allow to find equations for language classes in an inductive manner. Thereto we extend an important tool -- the block product or substitution principle -- known from logic and algebra, to non-regular language classes. Furthermore, we abstract this concept by defining it directly as an operation on (non-regular) language classes. We show that this principle can be used to obtain equations for certain circuit classes, given equations for the gate types. Concretely, we demonstrate the applicability of this method by obtaining a description via equations for all languages recognized by circuit families that contain a constant number of (inner) gates, given a description of the gate types via equations.