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The matching problem has no small symmetric SDP. (English) Zbl 1373.90094
Summary: M. Yannakakis [J. Comput. Syst. Sci. 43, No. 3, 441–466 (1991; Zbl 0748.90074)] showed that the matching problem does not have a small symmetric linear program. T. Rothvoss [in: Proceedings of the 46th annual ACM symposium on theory of computing, STOC ’14. New York, NY: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). 263–272 (2014; Zbl 1315.90038)] recently proved that any, not necessarily symmetric, linear program also has exponential size. In light of this, it is natural to ask whether the matching problem can be expressed compactly in a framework such as semidefinite programming (SDP) that is more powerful than linear programming but still allows efficient optimization. We answer this question negatively for symmetric SDPs: any symmetric SDP for the matching problem has exponential size. We also show that an $$O$$($$k$$)-round Lasserre SDP relaxation for the asymmetric metric traveling salesperson problem yields at least as good an approximation as any symmetric SDP relaxation of size $$n^{k}$$. The key technical ingredient underlying both these results is an upper bound on the degree needed to derive polynomial identities that hold over the space of matchings or traveling salesperson tours.

##### MSC:
 90C22 Semidefinite programming 68Q17 Computational difficulty of problems (lower bounds, completeness, difficulty of approximation, etc.) 05C70 Edge subsets with special properties (factorization, matching, partitioning, covering and packing, etc.)
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##### References:
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