Lower Bounds for the Size of Nondeterministic Circuits

Abstract: Nondeterministic circuits are a nondeterministic computation model in circuit complexity theory. In this paper, we prove a $3(n-1)$ lower bound for the size of nondeterministic $U_2$-circuits computing the parity function. It is known that the minimum size of (deterministic) $U_2$-circuits computing the parity function exactly equals $3(n-1)$. Thus, our result means that nondeterministic computation is useless to compute the parity function by $U_2$-circuits and cannot reduce the size from $3(n-1)$. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first nontrivial lower bound for the size of nondeterministic circuits (including formulas, constant depth circuits, and so on) with unlimited nondeterminism for an explicit Boolean function. We also discuss an approach to proving lower bounds for the size of deterministic circuits via lower bounds for the size of nondeterministic restricted circuits.