On the Sphere and Cylinder

Toda's theorem was proven by Seinosuke Toda in his paper "PP is as Hard as the Polynomial-Time Hierarchy" (1991) and was given the 1998 Gödel Prize. The theorem states that the entire polynomial hierarchy PH is contained in P^PP; this implies a closely related statement, that PH is contained in P^#P. #P is the problem of exactly counting the number of solutions to a polynomially-verifiable question (that is, to a question in NP), while loosely speaking, PP is the problem of giving an answer which is correct at least half the time. The class P^#P consists of all the problems which can be solved in polynomial time if you have access to instantaneous answers to any counting problem in #P (polynomial time relative to a #P oracle). Thus Toda's theorem implies that for any problem in the polynomial hierarchy there is a deterministic polynomial-time Turing reduction to a counting problem.

The proof is broken into two parts.

• First, it is established that

${\mathrm{\Sigma }}^P\cdot \mathsf{B}\mathsf{P}\cdot \oplus \mathsf{P}\subseteq \mathsf{B}\mathsf{P}\cdot \oplus \mathsf{P}$

The proof uses a variation of Valiant-Vazirani theorem. Because $\mathsf{B}\mathsf{P}\cdot \oplus \mathsf{P}$ contains $\mathsf{P}$ and is closed under complement, it follows by induction that $\mathsf{P}\mathsf{H}\subseteq \mathsf{B}\mathsf{P}\cdot \oplus \mathsf{P}$.

• Second, it is established that

$\mathsf{P}\cdot \oplus \mathsf{P}\subseteq {\mathsf{P}}^{\mathrm{♯}P}$

Together, the two parts imply

$\mathsf{P}\mathsf{H}\subseteq \mathsf{B}\mathsf{P}\cdot \oplus \mathsf{P}\subseteq \mathsf{P}\cdot \oplus \mathsf{P}\subseteq {\mathsf{P}}^{\mathrm{♯}P}$

References

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