Dynamic Complexity of Group Problems

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that certain group-theoretic problems, like Cayley Group Membership and magma isomorphism, can be maintained dynamically in DynFO, advancing the understanding of dynamic complexity in algebraic structures.

Contribution

It introduces new techniques for maintaining group properties in DynFO, including cube independence, and extends dynamic complexity results to group-theoretic problems.

Findings

Dynamic Cayley Group Membership is in DynFO.

Magma isomorphism for Abelian groups is in DynFO.

Introduces cube independence for subgroup generation.

Abstract

Dynamic Complexity was introduced by Immerman and Patnaik PI97 in the nineties and has seen a resurgence of interest with the positive resolution of their conjecture on directed reachability in DynFO DKMSZ18. Since then many natural problems related to reachability and matching have been placed in DynFO and related classes DMVZ18,DKMTVZ20,DTV21. In this work, we place some dynamic problems from group theory in DynFO. In particular, suppose we are given an arbitrary multiplication table over n elements representing an unstructured binary operation (representing a structure called a magma). Suppose the table evolves through a change in one of its n^2 entries in one step. For a set S of magma elements which also changes one element at a time, we can maintain enough auxiliary information so that when the magma is a group, we are able to answer the Cayley Group Membership (CGM) problem for S and a target t (i.e. "Is t a product of elements from S? ") using an FO query at every step. This places the dynamic CGM problem (for groups) when the ambient magma is specified via a table in DynFO. In contrast, for the table setting, statically CGM was known to be in the class Logspace BarringtonM06. Building on the dynamic CGM result, we can maintain the isomorphism of of two magmas, whenever both are Abelian groups, in DynFO. Our techniques include a way to maintain the powers of the elements of a magma in DynFO using left associative parenthesisation, the notion of cube independence to cube generate a subgroup generated by a set, a way to maintain maximal cube independent sequences in a magma along with some group theoretic machinery available from McKenzieCook. The notion of cube independent sequences is new as far as we know and may be of independent interest. These techniques are very different from the ones employed in Dynamic Complexity so far.