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In parameterized algorithmics, the process of kernelization is defined as a polynomial time algorithm that transforms the instance of a given problem to an equivalent instance of a size that is limited by a function of the parameter. As, afterwards, this smaller instance can then be solved to find an answer to the original question, kernelization is often presented as a form of preprocessing. A natural generalization of kernelization is the process that allows for a number of smaller instances to be produced to provide an answer to the original problem, possibly also using negation. This generalization is called Turing kernelization. Immediately, questions of equivalence occur or, when is one form possible and not the other. These have been long standing open problems in parameterized complexity. In the present paper, we answer many of these. In particular, we show that Turing kernelizations differ not only from regular kernelization, but also from intermediate forms as truth-table kernelizations. We achieve absolute results by diagonalizations and also results on natural problems depending on widely accepted complexity theoretic assumptions. In particular, we improve on known lower bounds for the kernel size of compositional problems using these assumptions.

Asking which sets are fixed-parameter tractable for a given parameterization constitutes much of the current research in parameterized complexity theory. This approach faces some of the core difficulties in complexity theory. By focussing instead on the parameterizations that make a given set fixed-parameter tractable, we circumvent these difficulties. We isolate parameterizations as independent measures of complexity and study their underlying algebraic structure. Thus we are able to compare parameterizations, which establishes a hierarchy of complexity that is much stronger than that present in typical parameterized algorithms races. Among other results, we find that no practically fixed-parameter tractable sets have optimal parameterizations.

Normalized information distance (NID) uses the theoretical notion of Kolmogorov complexity, which for practical purposes is approximated by the length of the compressed version of the file involved, using a real-world compression program. This practical application is called 'normalized compression distance' and it is trivially computable. It is a parameter-free similarity measure based on compression, and is used in pattern recognition, data mining, phylogeny, clustering, and classification. The complexity properties of its theoretical precursor, the NID, have been open. We show that the NID is neither upper semicomputable nor lower semicomputable., Comment: 9 pages, LaTeX, No figures, To appear in J. Comput. Syst. Sci

Normalized information distance (NID) uses the theoretical notion of Kolmogorov complexity, which for practical purposes is approximated by the length of the compressed version of the file involved, using a real-world compression program. This practical application is called `normalized compression distance' and it is trivially computable. It is a parameter-free similarity measure based on compression, and is used in pattern recognition, data mining, phylogeny, clustering, and classification. The complexity properties of its theoretical precursor, the NID, have been open. We show that the NID is neither upper semicomputable nor lower semicomputable up to any reasonable precision., Comment: LaTeX 8 pages, Submitted. 2nd version corrected some typos

We prove that P-sel, the class of all P-selective sets, is EXP-immune, but is not EXP/1-immune. That is, we prove that some infinite P-selective set has no infinite EXP-time subset, but we also prove that every infinite P-selective set has some infinite subset in EXP/1. Informally put, the immunity of P-sel is so fragile that it is pierced by a single bit of information. The above claims follow from broader results that we obtain about the immunity of the P-selective sets. In particular, we prove that for every recursive function f, P-sel is DTIME(f)-immune. Yet we also prove that P-sel is not \Pi_2^p/1-immune.

A set is autoreducible if it can be reduced to itself by a Turing machine that does not ask its own input to the oracle. We use autoreducibility to separate the polynomial-time hierarchy from polynomial space by showing that all Turing-complete sets for certain levels of the exponential-time hierarchy are autoreducible but there exists some Turing-complete set for doubly exponential space that is not. Although we already knew how to separate these classes using diagonalization, our proofs separate classes solely by showing they have different structural properties, thus applying Post's Program to complexity theory. We feel such techniques may prove unknown separations in the future. In particular, if we could settle the question as to whether all Turing-complete sets for doubly exponential time are autoreducible, we would separate either polynomial time from polynomial space, and nondeterministic logarithmic space from nondeterministic polynomial time, or else the polynomial-time hierarchy from exponential time. We also look at the autoreducibility of complete sets under nonadaptive, bounded query, probabilistic and nonuniform reductions. We show how settling some of these autoreducibility questions will also read to new complexity class separations.

The recognition problem for attribute-value grammars (AVGs) was shown to be undecidable by Johnson in 1988. Therefore, the general form of AVGs is of no practical use. In this paper we study a very restricted form of AVG, for which the recognition problem is decidable (though still NP-complete), the R-AVG. We show that the R-AVG formalism captures all of the context free languages and more, and introduce a variation on the so-called `off-line parsability constraint', the `honest parsability constraint', which lets different types of R-AVG coincide precisely with well-known time complexity classes., Comment: 18 pages, also available by (1) anonymous ftp at ftp://ftp.fwi.uva.nl/pub/theory/illc/researchReports/CT-95-02.ps.gz ; (2) WWW from http://www.fwi.uva.nl/~mtrautwe/