In computability theory and computational complexity theory, a many-one reduction is a reduction which converts instances of one decision problem into instances of a second decision problem. Reductions are thus used to measure the relative computational difficulty of two problems.
Contents
- Formal languages
- Subsets of natural numbers
- Many one equivalence and 1 equivalence
- Many one completeness m completeness
- Many one reductions with resource limitations
- Properties
- Reading
- References
Many-one reductions are a special case and stronger form of Turing reductions. With many-one reductions the oracle can be invoked only once at the end and the answer cannot be modified.
Many-one reductions were first used by Emil Post in a paper published in 1944. Later Norman Shapiro used the same concept in 1956 under the name strong reducibility.
Formal languages
Suppose A and B are formal languages over the alphabets Σ and Γ, respectively. A many-one reduction from A to B is a total computable function f : Σ* → Γ* that has the property that each word w is in A if and only if f(w) is in B (that is,
If such a function f exists, we say that A is many-one reducible or m-reducible to B and write
If there is an injective many-one reduction function then we say A is 1-reducible or one-one reducible to B and write
Subsets of natural numbers
Given two sets
if there exists a total computable function
Many-one equivalence and 1-equivalence
If
If
Many-one completeness (m-completeness)
A set B is called many-one complete, or simply m-complete, iff B is recursively enumerable and every recursively enumerable set A is m-reducible to B.
Many-one reductions with resource limitations
Many-one reductions are often subjected to resource restrictions, for example that the reduction function is computable in polynomial time or logarithmic space; see polynomial-time reduction and log-space reduction for details.
Given decision problems A and B and an algorithm N which solves instances of B, we can use a many-one reduction from A to B to solve instances of A in:
We say that a class C of languages (or a subset of the power set of the natural numbers) is closed under many-one reducibility if there exists no reduction from a language in C to a language outside C. If a class is closed under many-one reducibility, then many-one reduction can be used to show that a problem is in C by reducing a problem in C to it. Many-one reductions are valuable because most well-studied complexity classes are closed under some type of many-one reducibility, including P, NP, L, NL, co-NP, PSPACE, EXP, and many others. These classes are not closed under arbitrary many-one reductions, however.