Turing Machines with few Accepting Computations and low Sets for PP

The intractability of the complexity class NP has motivated the study of subclasses that arise when certain restrictions on the definition of NP are imposed. For example, the study of sparse sets in NP [Ma82], the study of the probabilistic classes whithin NP [Gi77], and the study of low sets in NP for the classes in the polynomial time hierarchy [Sc83], have been three main research streams in the area of complexity theory, and have clarified many structural aspects of the class NP. In this paper we study two different ways to restrict the power of NP: We consider languages accepted by nondeterministic polynomial time machines with a small number of accepting paths in case of acceptance, and also investigate subclasses of NP that are low for complexity classes not known to be in the polynomial time hierarchy. The first complexity class defined following the idea of bounding the number of accepting paths was Valiant’s class UP (unique P) [Va76] of languages accepted by nondeterministic Turing machines that have exactly one accepting computation path for strings in the language, and none for strings not in the language. This class plays an important role in the areas of one-way functions and cryptography, for example in [GrSe84] it is shown that P 6=UP if and only if one-way functions exist. The class UP can be generalized in a natural way by allowing a polynomial number of accepting paths. This gives rise to the class FewP defined by Allender [Al85] in connection with the notion of P-printable sets. We study complexity classes defined by such path-restricted nondeterministic polynomial time machines, and show results that exploit the fact that the machines for these classes have a bounded number of accepting computation paths. We will not only consider these subclasses of NP, namely UP and FewP, but also the class Few, an extension of FewP defined by Cai and Hemachandra [CaHe89], in which the accepting mechanism of the machine is more flexible.