Reed–Muller expansion


In Boolean logic, a Reed–Muller expansion is a decomposition of a Boolean function.
For a Boolean function we call
the positive and negative cofactors of with respect to, and
the boolean derivation of with respect to, where denotes the XOR operator.
Then we have for the Reed–Muller or positive Davio expansion:

Description

This equation is written in a way that it resembles a Taylor expansion of about. There is a similar decomposition corresponding to an expansion about :
Repeated application of the Reed–Muller expansion results in an XOR polynomial in :
This representation is unique and sometimes also called Reed–Muller expansion.
E.g. for the result would be
where
For the result would be
where

Geometric interpretation

This case can be given a cubical geometric interpretation as follows: when moving along the edge from to, XOR up the functions of the two end-vertices of the edge in order to obtain the coefficient of. To move from to there are two shortest paths: one is a two-edge path passing through and the other one a two-edge path passing through. These two paths encompass four vertices of a square, and XORing up the functions of these four vertices yields the coefficient of. Finally, to move from to there are six shortest paths which are three-edge paths, and these six paths encompass all the vertices of the cube, therefore the coefficient of can be obtained by XORing up the functions of all eight of the vertices.

Paths

The shortest paths all involve monotonic changes to the values of the variables, whereas non-shortest paths all involve non-monotonic changes of such variables; or, to put it another way, the shortest paths all have lengths equal to the Hamming distance between the starting and destination vertices. This means that it should be easy to generalize an algorithm for obtaining coefficients from a truth table by XORing up values of the function from appropriate rows of a truth table, even for hyperdimensional cases. Between the starting and destination rows of a truth table, some variables have their values remaining fixed: find all the rows of the truth table such that those variables likewise remain fixed at those given values, then XOR up their functions and the result should be the coefficient for the monomial corresponding to the destination row. and exclude any variable whose value is 0
Similar to binary decision diagrams, where nodes represent Shannon expansion with respect to the according variable, we can define a
decision diagram based on the Reed–Muller expansion. These decision diagrams are called functional BDDs.

Derivations

The Reed–Muller expansion can be derived from the XOR-form of the Shannon decomposition, using the identity :
Derivation of the expansion for :
Derivation of the second-order boolean derivative: