The central conjecture of parameterized complexity states that FPT !=W[1], and is generally regarded as the parameterized counterpart to P !=NP. We revisit the issue of the plausibility of FPT !=W[1], focusing on two aspects: the difficulty of proving the conjecture (assuming it holds), and how the relation between the two classes might differ from the one between P and NP. Regarding the first aspect, we give new evidence that separating FPT from W[1] would be considerably harder than doing the same for P and NP. Our main result regarding the relation between FPT and W[1] states that the closure of W[1] under relativization with FPT-oracles is precisely the class W[P], implying that either FPT is not low for W[1], or the W-Hierarchy collapses. This theorem also has consequences for the A-Hierarchy (a parameterized version of the Polynomial Hierarchy), namely that unless W[P] is a subset of some level A[t], there are structural differences between the A-Hierarchy and the Polynomial Hierarchy. We also prove that under the unlikely assumption that W[P] collapses to W[1] in a specific way, the collapse of any two consecutive levels of the A-Hierarchy implies the collapse of the entire hierarchy to a finite level; this extends a result of Chen, Flum, and Grohe (2005). Finally, we give weak (oracle-based) evidence that the inclusion W[t]subseteqA[t] is strict for t>1, and that the W-Hierarchy is proper. The latter result answers a question of Downey and Fellows (1993).
@InProceedings{bottesch:LIPIcs.MFCS.2018.73, author = {Bottesch, Ralph Christian}, title = {{On W\lbrack1\rbrack-Hardness as Evidence for Intractability}}, booktitle = {43rd International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (MFCS 2018)}, pages = {73:1--73:15}, series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)}, ISBN = {978-3-95977-086-6}, ISSN = {1868-8969}, year = {2018}, volume = {117}, editor = {Potapov, Igor and Spirakis, Paul and Worrell, James}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.MFCS.2018.73}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-96559}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.MFCS.2018.73}, annote = {Keywords: Parameterized complexity, Relativization} }
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