Irreducibility Testing of Sparse Polynomials over Integers is NP-hard and Probabilistic Polynomial Time
In this paper, we prove that irreducibility testing for sparse polynomials in $\mathbb{Z}[X]$ is coNP-hard under deterministic polynomial-time many-one reductions. That is, there exists no polynomial-time irreducibility test algorithm unless $\mathrm P=\mathrm{NP}$. We also provide an upper bound for this problem by demonstrating that the same irreducibility testing problem lies in $\mathsf{PP}\subseteq\mathsf{PSPACE}$; in other words, it can be solved in probabilistic polynomial time and, moreover, within polynomial space. The fact that $\mathsf{SparseIrred}_{\mathbb{Z}}\in\mathsf{PP}$ relies on the quasi-Riemann hypothesis result of Cureton--Thorner and on the uniform effective prime-ideal bound by Frei--Sofos--Widmer just posted recently.
Authors
- Jiawei Nie
- Qiao-Long Huang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0001-1596-5863)
- Yichuan Cao
- Xiao-Shan Gao
Publication Details
- Journal
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- Published
- 2026-10-27
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2610.37179
- Primary Topic
- Polynomial and algebraic computation
- Type
- preprint