English

Efficient indexing of necklaces and irreducible polynomials over finite fields

Computational Complexity 2015-04-03 v1

Abstract

We study the problem of indexing irreducible polynomials over finite fields, and give the first efficient algorithm for this problem. Specifically, we show the existence of poly(n, log q)-size circuits that compute a bijection between {1, ... , |S|} and the set S of all irreducible, monic, univariate polynomials of degree n over a finite field F_q. This has applications in pseudorandomness, and answers an open question of Alon, Goldreich, H{\aa}stad and Peralta[AGHP]. Our approach uses a connection between irreducible polynomials and necklaces ( equivalence classes of strings under cyclic rotation). Along the way, we give the first efficient algorithm for indexing necklaces of a given length over a given alphabet, which may be of independent interest.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1504.00572,
  title  = {Efficient indexing of necklaces and irreducible polynomials over finite fields},
  author = {Swastik Kopparty and Mrinal Kumar and Michael Saks},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1504.00572},
  year   = {2015}
}