The Fusion Method for Lower Bounds in Circuit Complexity
Avi Wigderson · 2003
This paper coins the term "The Fusion Method" to a recent approach for proving circuit lower bounds. It describes the method, and surveys its achievements, potential and challenges. 1 Introduction In a recent paper, Karchmer [6] suggested an elegant way in which one can view at the same time both the "approximation method" of Razborov [13] and the "topological approach" of Sipser [15] for proving circuit lower bounds. In Karchmer's setting the lower bound prover shows that a given circuit C is too small for computing a given function f by contradiction, in the following way. She tries to combine (or 'fuse', as we propose calling it) correct accepting computations of inputs in f \\Gamma1 (1) by C into an incorrect accepting computation of an input in f \\Gamma1 (0). It turns out that this "Fusion Method" reduces the dynamic computation of f by C into a static combinatorial cover problem, which provides the lower bound. Moreover, different restrictions on how we can fuse computations ...