*** Welcome to piglix ***

Permanent is sharp-P-complete


The #P-completeness of 01-permanent, sometimes known as Valiant's theorem, is a mathematical proof about the permanent of matrices, considered a seminal result in computational complexity theory. In a 1979 scholarly paper, Leslie Valiant proved that the computational problem of computing the permanent of a matrix is #P-hard, even if the matrix is restricted to have entries that are all 0 or 1. In this restricted case, computing the permanent is even #P-complete, because it corresponds to the #P problem of counting the number of permutation matrices one can get by changing ones into zeroes.

Valiant's 1979 paper also introduced #P as a complexity class.

One reason for interest in the computational complexity of the permanent is that it provides an example of a problem where constructing a single solution can be done efficiently but where counting all solutions is hard. As Papadimitriou writes in his book Computational Complexity:

Specifically, computing the permanent (shown to be difficult by Valiant's results) is closely connected with finding a perfect matching in a bipartite graph, which is solvable in polynomial time by the Hopcroft–Karp algorithm. For a bipartite graph with 2n vertices partitioned into two parts with n vertices each, the number of perfect matchings equals the permanent of its biadjacency matrix and the square of the number of perfect matchings is equal to the permanent of its adjacency matrix. Since any 0–1 matrix is the biadjacency matrix of some bipartite graph, Valiant's theorem implies that the problem of counting the number of perfect matchings in a bipartite graph is #P-complete, and in conjunction with Toda's theorem this implies that it is hard for the entire polynomial hierarchy.


...
Wikipedia

...