Tight Bounds for Monotone Switching Networks via Fourier Analysis.

We prove tight size bounds on monotone switching networks for the k-clique problem, and for an explicit monotone problem by analyzing the generation problem with a pyramid structure of height h. This gives alternative proofs of the separations of m-NC from m-P and of m-NCi from m-NCi+1, different from Raz-McKenzie (Combinatorica '99). The enumerative-combinatorial and Fourier analytic techniques in this work are very different from a large body of work on circuit depth lower bounds, and may be of independent interest.