Characterizations of PUNC and precomputation

Abstract

Much complexity-theoretic work on parallelism has focused on the class NC, which is defined in terms of logspace-uniform circuits. Yet P-uniform circuit complexity is in some ways a more natural setting for studying feasible parallelism. In this paper, P-uniform NC (PUNC) is characterized in terms of space-bounded AuxPDA's and alternating Turing Machines with bounded access to the input. We also present a general-purpose parallel computer for PUNC; this characterization leads to an easy proof that NC = PUNC iff all tally languages in P are in NC. The characterizations of PUNC lead to natural methods for modelling precomputation. We show that for many classes of interest, there is a single “universal” table which can be used in place of any table of similar size and complexity, while for certain other classes, no such “universal” table exists.