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On the power of deterministic reductions to C=P

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Abstract

The counting class C=P, which captures the notion of “exact counting”, while extremely powerful under various nondeterministic reductions, is quite weak under polynomial-time deterministic reductions. We discuss the analogies between NP and co-C=P, which allow us to derive many interesting results for such deterministic reductions to co-C=P. We exploit these results to obtain some interesting oracle separations. Most importantly, we show that there exists an oracleA such that\( \oplus P^A \nsubseteq P^{C_ = P^A } \) and\(BPP^A \nsubseteq P^{C_ = P^A } \) Therefore, techniques that would prove that C=P and PP are polynomial-time Turing equivalent, or that C=P is polynomial-time Turing hard for the polynomial-time hierarchy, would not relativize.

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This research was supported by a grant from the Directión General de Investigation Cientifica y Técnica (DGICYT), Spanish Ministry of Education, while the author was vising the Facultat d'lnformàtica, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona.

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Green, F. On the power of deterministic reductions to C=P. Math. Systems Theory 26, 215–233 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01202284

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