#CFG and #DNNF admit FPRAS

Abstract

We provide the first fully polynomial-time randomized approximation scheme for the following two counting problems: 1. Given a Context-Free Grammar G over alphabet Sigma , count the number of words of length exactly n generated by G 2. Given a circuit phi in Decomposable Negation Normal Form (DNNF) over the set of Boolean variables X , compute the number of assignments to X such that phi evaluates to 1. Finding polynomial time algorithms for the aforementioned problems has been a longstanding open problem. Prior work could either only obtain a quasi-polynomial runtime or a polynomial-time randomized approximation scheme for non-deterministic finite automata and non-deterministic tree automata.

Publication
In Proceedings of the Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA), pp. 5978–6010

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