On the black-box complexity of Sperner's Lemma

Abstract

We present several results on the complexity of various forms of Sperner's Lemma in the black-box model of computing. We give a deterministic algorithm for Sperner problems over pseudo-manifolds of arbitrary dimension. The query complexity of our algorithm is linear in the separation number of the skeleton graph of the manifold and the size of its boundary. As a corollary we get an $O(\sqrt{n})$ deterministic query algorithm for the black-box version of the problem {\bf 2D-SPERNER}, a well studied member of Papadimitriou's complexity class PPAD. This upper bound matches the $Ω(\sqrt{n})$ deterministic lower bound of Crescenzi and Silvestri. The tightness of this bound was not known before. In another result we prove for the same problem an $Ω(\sqrt[4]{n})$ lower bound for its probabilistic, and an $Ω(\sqrt[8]{n})$ lower bound for its quantum query complexity, showing that all these measures are polynomially related.