Sublinear Time Algorithms for Abelian Group Isomorphism and Basis Construction

Abstract: In his paper, we study the problems of abelian group isomorphism and basis construction in two models. In the {\it partially specified model} (PS-model), the algorithm does not know the group size but can access randomly chosen elements of the group along with the Cayley table of those elements, which provides the result of the binary operation for every pair of selected elements. In the stronger {\it fully specified model} (FS-model), the algorithm knows the size of the group and has access to its elements and Cayley table. Given two abelian groups, $G$, and $H$, we present an algorithm in the PS-model (and hence in the FS-model) that runs in time $\tilde O(\sqrt{|G|})$ and decides if they are isomorphic. This improves on Kavitha's linear-time algorithm and gives the first sublinear-time solution for this problem. We then prove the lower bound $\Omega(|G|^{1/4})$ for the FS-model and the tight bound $\Omega(\sqrt{|G|})$ for the PS-model. This is the first known lower bound for this problem. We obtain similar results for finding a basis for abelian groups. For deterministic algorithms, a simple $\Omega(|G|)$ lower bound is given.