Matroid complexity and non-succinct descriptions

Abstract

We investigate an approach to matroid complexity that involves describing a matroid via a list of independent sets, bases, circuits, or some other family of subsets of the ground set. The computational complexity of algorithmic problems under this scheme appears to be highly dependent on the choice of input-type. We define an order on the various methods of description, and we show how this order acts upon ten types of input. We also show that under this approach several natural algorithmic problems for matroids are complete in classes thought not to be equal to P.