Open Questions in the Theory of Semifeasible Computation

Abstract

The study of semifeasible algorithms was initiated by Selman's work a quarter of century ago [Sel79,Sel81,Sel82]. Informally put, this research stream studies the power of those sets L for which there is a deterministic (or in some cases, the function may belong to one of various nondeterministic function classes) polynomial-time function f such that when at least one of x and y belongs to L, then f(x,y) \in L \cap \{x,y\}. The intuition here is that it is saying: ``Regarding membership in L, if you put a gun to my head and forced me to bet on one of x or y as belonging to L, my money would be on f(x,y).'' In this article, we present a number of open problems from the theory of semifeasible algorithms. For each we present its background and review what partial results, if any, are known.