The Existential Theory of the Reals as a Complexity Class: A Compendium

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the complexity class x al{R}, exploring its origins, applications across various fields, and a detailed compendium of problems complete or hard for this class, highlighting open research questions.

Contribution

It offers the first extensive survey and a detailed problem compendium for x al{R}, connecting diverse areas and outlining open challenges in the field.

Findings

x al{R} captures the complexity of the existential theory of the reals.

Many problems in geometry, graph theory, and logic are complete or hard for x al{R}.

The survey identifies numerous open problems and research directions.

Abstract

We survey the complexity class $\exists \mathbb{R}$, which captures the complexity of deciding the existential theory of the reals. The class $\exists \mathbb{R}$ has roots in two different traditions, one based on the Blum-Shub-Smale model of real computation, and the other following work by Mn\"{e}v and Shor on the universality of realization spaces of oriented matroids. Over the years the number of problems for which $\exists \mathbb{R}$ rather than NP has turned out to be the proper way of measuring their complexity has grown, particularly in the fields of computational geometry, graph drawing, game theory, and some areas in logic and algebra. $\exists \mathbb{R}$ has also started appearing in the context of machine learning, Markov decision processes, and probabilistic reasoning. We have aimed at collecting a comprehensive compendium of problems complete and hard for $\exists \mathbb{R}$, as well as a long list of open problems. The compendium is presented in the third part of our survey; a tour through the compendium and the areas it touches on makes up the second part. The first part introduces the reader to the existential theory of the reals as a complexity class, discussing its history, motivation and prospects as well as some technical aspects.