Abstract

The representation of functions as low-degree polynomials over various rings has provided many insights in the theory of small-depth circuits. We survey some of the closure properties, upper bounds, and lower bounds obtained via this approach. 1. Introduction There is a long history of using polynomials in order to prove complexity bounds. Minsky and Papert [39] used polynomials to prove early lower bounds on the order of perceptrons. Razborov [46] and Smolensky [49] used them to prove lower bounds on the size of AND-OR circuits. Other lower bounds via polynomials are due to [50, 4, 10, 51, 9, 55]. Paturi and Saks [44] discovered that rational functions could be used for lower bounds on the size of threshold circuits. Toda [53] used polynomials to prove upper bounds on the power of the polynomial hierarchy. This led to a series of upper bounds on the power of the polynomial hierarchy [54, 52], AC 0 [2, 3, 52, 19], and ACC [58, 20, 30, 37], and related classes [21, 42]. Beigel and Gi...

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