20 research outputs found
Tighter Relations Between Sensitivity and Other Complexity Measures
Sensitivity conjecture is a longstanding and fundamental open problem in the
area of complexity measures of Boolean functions and decision tree complexity.
The conjecture postulates that the maximum sensitivity of a Boolean function is
polynomially related to other major complexity measures. Despite much attention
to the problem and major advances in analysis of Boolean functions in the past
decade, the problem remains wide open with no positive result toward the
conjecture since the work of Kenyon and Kutin from 2004.
In this work, we present new upper bounds for various complexity measures in
terms of sensitivity improving the bounds provided by Kenyon and Kutin.
Specifically, we show that deg(f)^{1-o(1)}=O(2^{s(f)}) and C(f) < 2^{s(f)-1}
s(f); these in turn imply various corollaries regarding the relation between
sensitivity and other complexity measures, such as block sensitivity, via known
results. The gap between sensitivity and other complexity measures remains
exponential but these results are the first improvement for this difficult
problem that has been achieved in a decade.Comment: This is the merged form of arXiv submission 1306.4466 with another
work. Appeared in ICALP 2014, 14 page
Weak Parity
We study the query complexity of Weak Parity: the problem of computing the
parity of an n-bit input string, where one only has to succeed on a 1/2+eps
fraction of input strings, but must do so with high probability on those inputs
where one does succeed. It is well-known that n randomized queries and n/2
quantum queries are needed to compute parity on all inputs. But surprisingly,
we give a randomized algorithm for Weak Parity that makes only
O(n/log^0.246(1/eps)) queries, as well as a quantum algorithm that makes only
O(n/sqrt(log(1/eps))) queries. We also prove a lower bound of
Omega(n/log(1/eps)) in both cases; and using extremal combinatorics, prove
lower bounds of Omega(log n) in the randomized case and Omega(sqrt(log n)) in
the quantum case for any eps>0. We show that improving our lower bounds is
intimately related to two longstanding open problems about Boolean functions:
the Sensitivity Conjecture, and the relationships between query complexity and
polynomial degree.Comment: 18 page