On the Complexity of Modulo-q Arguments and the Chevalley-Warning Theorem

12/10/2019

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by   Mika Göös, et al.

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We study the search problem class PPA_q defined as a modulo-q analog of the well-known polynomial parity argument class PPA introduced by Papadimitriou '94. Our first result shows that this class can be characterized in terms of PPA_p for prime p. Our main result is to establish that an explicit version of a search problem associated to the Chevalley–Warning theorem is complete for PPA_p for prime p. This problem is natural in that it does not explicitly involve circuits as part of the input. It is the first such complete problem for PPA_p when p > 3. Finally we discuss connections between Chevalley-Warning theorem and the well-studied short integer solution problem and survey the structural properties of PPA_q.