Determinant versus permanent

Abstract

We study the problem of expressing permanents of matrices as determinants of (possibly larger) matrices. This problem has close connections to the complexity of arithmetic computations: the complexities of computing permanent and determinant roughly correspond to arithmetic versions of the classes NP and P respectively. We survey known results about their relative complexity and describe two recently developed approaches that might lead to a proof of the conjecture that the permanent can only be expressed as the determinant of exponential-sized matrices.