1,579 research outputs found
Noise Sensitivity of Boolean Functions and Applications to Percolation
It is shown that a large class of events in a product probability space are
highly sensitive to noise, in the sense that with high probability, the
configuration with an arbitrary small percent of random errors gives almost no
prediction whether the event occurs. On the other hand, weighted majority
functions are shown to be noise-stable. Several necessary and sufficient
conditions for noise sensitivity and stability are given.
Consider, for example, bond percolation on an by grid. A
configuration is a function that assigns to every edge the value 0 or 1. Let
be a random configuration, selected according to the uniform measure.
A crossing is a path that joins the left and right sides of the rectangle, and
consists entirely of edges with . By duality, the probability
for having a crossing is 1/2. Fix an . For each edge , let
with probability , and
with probability , independently of the
other edges. Let be the probability for having a crossing in
, conditioned on . Then for all sufficiently large,
.Comment: To appear in Inst. Hautes Etudes Sci. Publ. Mat
On the Sensitivity Conjecture
The sensitivity of a Boolean function f:{0,1}^n -> {0,1} is the maximal number of neighbors a point in the Boolean hypercube has with different f-value. Roughly speaking, the block sensitivity allows to flip a set of bits (called a block) rather than just one bit, in order to change the value of f. The sensitivity conjecture, posed by Nisan and Szegedy (CC, 1994), states that the block sensitivity, bs(f), is at most polynomial in the sensitivity, s(f), for any Boolean function f. A positive answer to the conjecture will have many consequences, as the block sensitivity is polynomially related to many other complexity measures such as the certificate complexity, the decision tree complexity and the degree. The conjecture is far from being understood, as there is an exponential gap between the known upper and lower bounds relating bs(f) and s(f).
We continue a line of work started by Kenyon and Kutin (Inf. Comput., 2004), studying the l-block sensitivity, bs_l(f), where l bounds the size of sensitive blocks. While for bs_2(f) the picture is well understood with almost matching upper and lower bounds, for bs_3(f) it is not. We show that any development in understanding bs_3(f) in terms of s(f) will have great implications on the original question. Namely, we show that either bs(f) is at most sub-exponential in s(f) (which improves the state of the art upper bounds) or that bs_3(f) >= s(f){3-epsilon} for some Boolean functions (which improves the state of the art separations).
We generalize the question of bs(f) versus s(f) to bounded functions f:{0,1}^n -> [0,1] and show an analog result to that of Kenyon and Kutin: bs_l(f) = O(s(f))^l. Surprisingly, in this case, the bounds are close to being tight. In particular, we construct a bounded function f:{0,1}^n -> [0, 1] with bs(f) n/log(n) and s(f) = O(log(n)), a clear counterexample to the sensitivity conjecture for bounded functions.
Finally, we give a new super-quadratic separation between sensitivity and decision tree complexity by constructing Boolean functions with DT(f) >= s(f)^{2.115}. Prior to this work, only quadratic separations, DT(f) = s(f)^2, were known
Arctic octahedron in three-dimensional rhombus tilings and related integer solid partitions
Three-dimensional integer partitions provide a convenient representation of
codimension-one three-dimensional random rhombus tilings. Calculating the
entropy for such a model is a notoriously difficult problem. We apply
transition matrix Monte Carlo simulations to evaluate their entropy with high
precision. We consider both free- and fixed-boundary tilings. Our results
suggest that the ratio of free- and fixed-boundary entropies is
, and can be interpreted as the ratio of the
volumes of two simple, nested, polyhedra. This finding supports a conjecture by
Linde, Moore and Nordahl concerning the ``arctic octahedron phenomenon'' in
three-dimensional random tilings
- …