CMU-CS-02-110
Computer Science Department
School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University



CMU-CS-02-110

On the Complexity of MAX/MIN/AVRG Circuits

Manuel Blum, Rache Rue, Ke Yang

March 2002

CMU-CS-02-110.ps
CMU-CS-02-110.pdf


Keywords: Circuits, complexity, NP, co-NP, two-person game


We study the complexity of a class of circuits, namely, the MAX/MIN/AVRG circuits. On the wires of these circuits are real values between 0 and 1; the functions each gate performs are MAX, MIN, and AVERAGE of fan-in 2; there can be feed-backs in the circuit. It can be shown that every such circuit has at least a "stable" solution, meaning that there is a way to set each wire to a particular value such that each gate is satisfied. However, finding a stable solution in polynomial time seems to be a tricky problem and remains unsolved. We discuss some results concerning this computation model, as well as its applications.

31 pages


Return to: SCS Technical Report Collection
School of Computer Science homepage

This page maintained by reports@cs.cmu.edu