A New Study of Applying Complexity Theoretical Tools in Algorithm Design

Given n vectors with dimension m in Boolean domain, how to find two vectors whose pairwise Hamming distance is minimum? This problem is known as the Closest Pair Problem. If these vectors are generated uniformly at random except two of them are correlated with Pearson-correlation coefficient, then the problem is called the Light Bulb Problem. In this work, we propose a novel coding-based scheme for the Closest Pair Problem. We design both randomized and deterministic algorithms, which achieve the best-known running time when the length of input vectors m is small and the minimum distance is very small compared to m. When applied to the Light Bulb Problem, our result yields state-of-the-art deterministic running time when the Pearson-correlation coefficient is very large. Specifically, when it is greater than 0.9933, our deterministic algorithm runs faster than the previously best deterministic algorithm (Alman, SOSA 2019)