On the expressibility of stochastic switching circuits

Abstract

Stochastic switching circuits are relay circuits that consist of stochastic switches (that we call pswitches). We study the expressive power of these circuits; in particular, we address the following basic question: given an arbitrary integer q, and a pswitch set {1/q, 2/q, ..., q-1/q}, can we realize any rational probability with denominator q^n (for arbitrary n) by a simple series-parallel stochastic switching circuit? In this paper, we generalized previous results and prove that when q is a multiple of 2 or 3 the answer is positive. We also show that when q is a prime number the answer is negative. In addition, we prove that any desired probability can be approximated well by a linear in n size circuit, with error less than q^(-n).