The complexity of counting problems

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• David Richerby, University of Essex
• Friday 29 April 2022, 14:00-15:00
• SS03.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Jamie Vicary.

Every computational decision problem (“Is there an X?”) has a natural counting variant (“How many X’s are there?”). More generally, computing weighted sums such as integrals, expectations and partition functions in statistical physics can also be seen as counting problems.

I will give an introduction to the complexity of solving counting problems. I will focus on variants of constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) and exactly counting the solutions, though I’ll also touch on approximate counting. CSPs are powerful enough to naturally express many important problems, but also being restricted enough to allow their computational complexity to be classified completely and elegantly.

This talk is part of the Logic and Semantics Seminar (Computer Laboratory) series.

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