105,516 research outputs found
Three Puzzles on Mathematics, Computation, and Games
In this lecture I will talk about three mathematical puzzles involving
mathematics and computation that have preoccupied me over the years. The first
puzzle is to understand the amazing success of the simplex algorithm for linear
programming. The second puzzle is about errors made when votes are counted
during elections. The third puzzle is: are quantum computers possible?Comment: ICM 2018 plenary lecture, Rio de Janeiro, 36 pages, 7 Figure
The matching polytope does not admit fully-polynomial size relaxation schemes
The groundbreaking work of Rothvo{\ss} [arxiv:1311.2369] established that
every linear program expressing the matching polytope has an exponential number
of inequalities (formally, the matching polytope has exponential extension
complexity). We generalize this result by deriving strong bounds on the
polyhedral inapproximability of the matching polytope: for fixed , every polyhedral -approximation
requires an exponential number of inequalities, where is the number of
vertices. This is sharp given the well-known -approximation of size
provided by the odd-sets of size up to
. Thus matching is the first problem in , whose natural
linear encoding does not admit a fully polynomial-size relaxation scheme (the
polyhedral equivalent of an FPTAS), which provides a sharp separation from the
polynomial-size relaxation scheme obtained e.g., via constant-sized odd-sets
mentioned above.
Our approach reuses ideas from Rothvo{\ss} [arxiv:1311.2369], however the
main lower bounding technique is different. While the original proof is based
on the hyperplane separation bound (also called the rectangle corruption
bound), we employ the information-theoretic notion of common information as
introduced in Braun and Pokutta [http://eccc.hpi-web.de/report/2013/056/],
which allows to analyze perturbations of slack matrices. It turns out that the
high extension complexity for the matching polytope stem from the same source
of hardness as for the correlation polytope: a direct sum structure.Comment: 21 pages, 3 figure
Public projects, Boolean functions and the borders of Border's theorem
Border's theorem gives an intuitive linear characterization of the feasible
interim allocation rules of a Bayesian single-item environment, and it has
several applications in economic and algorithmic mechanism design. All known
generalizations of Border's theorem either restrict attention to relatively
simple settings, or resort to approximation. This paper identifies a
complexity-theoretic barrier that indicates, assuming standard complexity class
separations, that Border's theorem cannot be extended significantly beyond the
state-of-the-art. We also identify a surprisingly tight connection between
Myerson's optimal auction theory, when applied to public project settings, and
some fundamental results in the analysis of Boolean functions.Comment: Accepted to ACM EC 201
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