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Boolean Operations, Joins, and the Extended Low Hierarchy

Lane A. Hemaspaandra·Zhigen Jiang·Joerg Rothe·Osamu Watanabe
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Abstract

We prove that the join of two sets may actually fall into a lower level of the extended low hierarchy than either of the sets. In particular, there exist sets that are not in the second level of the extended low hierarchy, EL_2, yet their join is in EL_2. That is, in terms of extended lowness, the join operator can lower complexity. Since in a strong intuitive sense the join does not lower complexity, our result suggests that the extended low hierarchy is unnatural as a complexity measure. We also study the closure properties of EL_ and prove that EL_2 is not closed under certain Boolean operations. To this end, we establish the first known (and optimal) EL_2 lower bounds for certain notions generalizing Selman's P-selectivity, which may be regarded as an interesting result in its own right.

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Lane A. Hemaspaandra, Zhigen Jiang, Joerg Rothe, Osamu Watanabe. 1999-07-25. Boolean Operations, Joins, and the Extended Low Hierarchy. https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/9907037

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