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Holant problems are a family of counting problems on graphs, parametrised by sets of complex-valued functions of Boolean inputs. Holant^c denotes a subfamily of those problems, where any function set considered must contain the two unary functions pinning inputs to values 0 or 1. The complexity classification of Holant problems usually takes the form of dichotomy theorems, showing that for any set of functions in the family, the problem is either #P-hard or it can be solved in polynomial time. Previous such results include a dichotomy for real-valued Holant^c and one for Holant^c with complex symmetric functions, i.e. functions which only depend on the Hamming weight of the input. Here, we derive a dichotomy theorem for Holant^c with complex-valued, not necessarily symmetric functions. The tractable cases are the complex-valued generalisations of the tractable cases of the real-valued Holant^c dichotomy. The proof uses results from quantum information theory, particularly about entanglement. This full dichotomy for Holant^c answers a question that has been open for almost a decade.
@InProceedings{backens:LIPIcs.ICALP.2018.12,
author = {Backens, Miriam},
title = {{A Complete Dichotomy for Complex-Valued Holant^c}},
booktitle = {45th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2018)},
pages = {12:1--12:14},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-076-7},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2018},
volume = {107},
editor = {Chatzigiannakis, Ioannis and Kaklamanis, Christos and Marx, D\'{a}niel and Sannella, Donald},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2018.12},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-90168},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2018.12},
annote = {Keywords: computational complexity, counting complexity, Holant problems, dichotomy, entanglement}
}