P-uniform circuit complexity

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 AuxPDAs and alternating Turing Machines with bounded access to the input. The notions of general-purpose and special-purpose computation are considered, and a general-purpose parallel computer for PUNC is presented. It is also shown that NC = PUNC if all tally languages in P are in NC; this implies that the NC = PUNC question and the NC = P question are both instances of the ASPACE(<italic>S</italic>(<italic>n</italic>)) = ASPACE,TIME(<italic>S</italic>(<italic>n</italic>), <italic>S</italic>(<italic>n</italic>)<supscrpt><italic>o</italic>(1)</supscrpt>) question. As a corollary, it follows that NC = PUNC implies PSPACE = DTIME(2<supscrpt><italic>no</italic>(1)</supscrpt>).

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