9,169 research outputs found
A Nearly Optimal Lower Bound on the Approximate Degree of AC
The approximate degree of a Boolean function is the least degree of a real polynomial that
approximates pointwise to error at most . We introduce a generic
method for increasing the approximate degree of a given function, while
preserving its computability by constant-depth circuits.
Specifically, we show how to transform any Boolean function with
approximate degree into a function on variables with approximate degree at least . In particular, if , then
is polynomially larger than . Moreover, if is computed by a
polynomial-size Boolean circuit of constant depth, then so is .
By recursively applying our transformation, for any constant we
exhibit an AC function of approximate degree . This
improves over the best previous lower bound of due to
Aaronson and Shi (J. ACM 2004), and nearly matches the trivial upper bound of
that holds for any function. Our lower bounds also apply to
(quasipolynomial-size) DNFs of polylogarithmic width.
We describe several applications of these results. We give:
* For any constant , an lower bound on the
quantum communication complexity of a function in AC.
* A Boolean function with approximate degree at least ,
where is the certificate complexity of . This separation is optimal
up to the term in the exponent.
* Improved secret sharing schemes with reconstruction procedures in AC.Comment: 40 pages, 1 figur
Query-Efficient Locally Decodable Codes of Subexponential Length
We develop the algebraic theory behind the constructions of Yekhanin (2008)
and Efremenko (2009), in an attempt to understand the ``algebraic niceness''
phenomenon in . We show that every integer ,
where , and are prime, possesses the same good algebraic property as
that allows savings in query complexity. We identify 50 numbers of this
form by computer search, which together with 511, are then applied to gain
improvements on query complexity via Itoh and Suzuki's composition method. More
precisely, we construct a -query LDC for every positive
integer and a -query
LDC for every integer , both of length , improving the
queries used by Efremenko (2009) and queries used by Itoh and
Suzuki (2010).
We also obtain new efficient private information retrieval (PIR) schemes from
the new query-efficient LDCs.Comment: to appear in Computational Complexit
Sensitivity Conjecture and Log-rank Conjecture for functions with small alternating numbers
The Sensitivity Conjecture and the Log-rank Conjecture are among the most
important and challenging problems in concrete complexity. Incidentally, the
Sensitivity Conjecture is known to hold for monotone functions, and so is the
Log-rank Conjecture for and with monotone
functions , where and are bit-wise AND and XOR,
respectively. In this paper, we extend these results to functions which
alternate values for a relatively small number of times on any monotone path
from to . These deepen our understandings of the two conjectures,
and contribute to the recent line of research on functions with small
alternating numbers
Query-to-Communication Lifting for BPP
For any -bit boolean function , we show that the randomized
communication complexity of the composed function , where is an
index gadget, is characterized by the randomized decision tree complexity of
. In particular, this means that many query complexity separations involving
randomized models (e.g., classical vs. quantum) automatically imply analogous
separations in communication complexity.Comment: 21 page
Parameterized Two-Player Nash Equilibrium
We study the computation of Nash equilibria in a two-player normal form game
from the perspective of parameterized complexity. Recent results proved
hardness for a number of variants, when parameterized by the support size. We
complement those results, by identifying three cases in which the problem
becomes fixed-parameter tractable. These cases occur in the previously studied
settings of sparse games and unbalanced games as well as in the newly
considered case of locally bounded treewidth games that generalizes both these
two cases
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