We prove that it is Π₂^𝖯-complete to verify whether the diameter of a given permutation group G = ⟨A⟩ is bounded by a unary encoded number k. This solves an open problem from a paper of Even and Goldreich, where the problem was shown to be NP-hard. Verifying whether the diameter is exactly k is complete for the class consisting of all intersections of a Π₂^𝖯-language and a Σ₂^𝖯-language. A similar result is shown for the length of a given permutation π, which is the minimal k such that π can be written as a product of at most k generators from A. Even and Goldreich proved that it is NP-complete to verify, whether the length of a given π is at most k (with k given in unary encoding). We show that it is DP-complete to verify whether the length is exactly k. Finally, we deduce from our result on the diameter that it is Π₂^𝖯-complete to check whether a given finite automaton with transitions labelled by permutations from S_n produces all permutations from S_n.
@InProceedings{lohrey_et_al:LIPIcs.ICALP.2023.134, author = {Lohrey, Markus and Rosowski, Andreas}, title = {{On the Complexity of Diameter and Related Problems in Permutation Groups}}, booktitle = {50th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2023)}, pages = {134:1--134:18}, series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)}, ISBN = {978-3-95977-278-5}, ISSN = {1868-8969}, year = {2023}, volume = {261}, editor = {Etessami, Kousha and Feige, Uriel and Puppis, Gabriele}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2023.134}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-181864}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2023.134}, annote = {Keywords: algorithms for finite groups, diameter of permutation groups, rational subsets in groups} }
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