On Symmetric Algorithms for Bilinear Forms over Finite Fields

In this paper we study the computation of symmetric systems of bilinear forms over finite fields via symmetric bilinear algorithms. We show that, in general, the symmetric complexity of a system is upper bounded by a constant multiple of the bilinear complexity; we characterize symmetric algorithms in terms of the cosets of a specific cyclic code, and we show that the problem of finding an optimal symmetric algorithm is equivalent to the maximum-likelihood decoding problem for this code.