Hardness Results for Approximate Pure Horn CNF Formulae Minimization
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We study the hardness of approximation of clause minimum and literal minimum representations of pure Horn functions in n Boolean variables. We show that unless P=NP, it is not possible to approximate in polynomial time the minimum number of clauses and the minimum number of literals of pure Horn CNF representations to within a factor of 2^^1-o(1) n. This is the case even when the inputs are restricted to pure Horn 3-CNFs with O(n^1+ε) clauses, for some small positive constant ε. Furthermore, we show that even allowing sub-exponential time computation, it is still not possible to obtain constant factor approximations for such problems unless the Exponential Time Hypothesis turns out to be false.
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