583,502 research outputs found
Some Facets of Complexity Theory and Cryptography: A Five-Lectures Tutorial
In this tutorial, selected topics of cryptology and of computational
complexity theory are presented. We give a brief overview of the history and
the foundations of classical cryptography, and then move on to modern
public-key cryptography. Particular attention is paid to cryptographic
protocols and the problem of constructing the key components of such protocols
such as one-way functions. A function is one-way if it is easy to compute, but
hard to invert. We discuss the notion of one-way functions both in a
cryptographic and in a complexity-theoretic setting. We also consider
interactive proof systems and present some interesting zero-knowledge
protocols. In a zero-knowledge protocol one party can convince the other party
of knowing some secret information without disclosing any bit of this
information. Motivated by these protocols, we survey some complexity-theoretic
results on interactive proof systems and related complexity classes.Comment: 57 pages, 17 figures, Lecture Notes for the 11th Jyvaskyla Summer
Schoo
A Survey of Quantum Learning Theory
This paper surveys quantum learning theory: the theoretical aspects of
machine learning using quantum computers. We describe the main results known
for three models of learning: exact learning from membership queries, and
Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) and agnostic learning from classical or
quantum examples.Comment: 26 pages LaTeX. v2: many small changes to improve the presentation.
This version will appear as Complexity Theory Column in SIGACT News in June
2017. v3: fixed a small ambiguity in the definition of gamma(C) and updated a
referenc
A Survey on Continuous Time Computations
We provide an overview of theories of continuous time computation. These
theories allow us to understand both the hardness of questions related to
continuous time dynamical systems and the computational power of continuous
time analog models. We survey the existing models, summarizing results, and
point to relevant references in the literature
Circuit Complexity Meets Ontology-Based Data Access
Ontology-based data access is an approach to organizing access to a database
augmented with a logical theory. In this approach query answering proceeds
through a reformulation of a given query into a new one which can be answered
without any use of theory. Thus the problem reduces to the standard database
setting.
However, the size of the query may increase substantially during the
reformulation. In this survey we review a recently developed framework on
proving lower and upper bounds on the size of this reformulation by employing
methods and results from Boolean circuit complexity.Comment: To appear in proceedings of CSR 2015, LNCS 9139, Springe
Average-Case Complexity
We survey the average-case complexity of problems in NP.
We discuss various notions of good-on-average algorithms, and present
completeness results due to Impagliazzo and Levin. Such completeness results
establish the fact that if a certain specific (but somewhat artificial) NP
problem is easy-on-average with respect to the uniform distribution, then all
problems in NP are easy-on-average with respect to all samplable distributions.
Applying the theory to natural distributional problems remain an outstanding
open question. We review some natural distributional problems whose
average-case complexity is of particular interest and that do not yet fit into
this theory.
A major open question whether the existence of hard-on-average problems in NP
can be based on the PNP assumption or on related worst-case assumptions.
We review negative results showing that certain proof techniques cannot prove
such a result. While the relation between worst-case and average-case
complexity for general NP problems remains open, there has been progress in
understanding the relation between different ``degrees'' of average-case
complexity. We discuss some of these ``hardness amplification'' results
Search and witness problems in group theory
Decision problems are problems of the following nature: given a property P
and an object O, find out whether or not the object O has the property P. On
the other hand, witness problems are: given a property P and an object O with
the property P, find a proof of the fact that O indeed has the property P. On
the third hand(?!), search problems are of the following nature: given a
property P and an object O with the property P, find something "material"
establishing the property P; for example, given two conjugate elements of a
group, find a conjugator. In this survey our focus is on various search
problems in group theory, including the word search problem, the subgroup
membership search problem, the conjugacy search problem, and others
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