Small Hazard-free Transducers

Abstract: Ikenmeyer et al. (JACM'19) proved an unconditional exponential separation between the hazard-free complexity and (standard) circuit complexity of explicit functions. This raises the question: which classes of functions permit efficient hazard-free circuits? In this work, we prove that circuit implementations of transducers with small state space are such a class. A transducer is a finite state machine that transcribes, symbol by symbol, an input string of length $n$ into an output string of length $n$. We present a construction that transforms any function arising from a transducer into an efficient circuit of size $\mathcal{O}(n)$ computing the hazard-free extension of the function. More precisely, given a transducer with $s$ states, receiving $n$ input symbols encoded by $l$ bits, and computing $n$ output symbols encoded by $m$ bits, the transducer has a hazard-free circuit of size $2^{{\mathcal{O}(s+\ell)}} m n$ and depth $\mathcal{O}(s\log n + \ell)$; in particular, if $s, \ell,m\in \mathcal{O}(1)$, size and depth are asymptotically optimal. In light of the strong hardness results by Ikenmeyer et al. (JACM'19), we consider this a surprising result.