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Dispersion of Mass and the Complexity of Randomized Geometric Algorithms
How much can randomness help computation? Motivated by this general question
and by volume computation, one of the few instances where randomness provably
helps, we analyze a notion of dispersion and connect it to asymptotic convex
geometry. We obtain a nearly quadratic lower bound on the complexity of
randomized volume algorithms for convex bodies in R^n (the current best
algorithm has complexity roughly n^4, conjectured to be n^3). Our main tools,
dispersion of random determinants and dispersion of the length of a random
point from a convex body, are of independent interest and applicable more
generally; in particular, the latter is closely related to the variance
hypothesis from convex geometry. This geometric dispersion also leads to lower
bounds for matrix problems and property testing.Comment: Full version of L. Rademacher, S. Vempala: Dispersion of Mass and the
Complexity of Randomized Geometric Algorithms. Proc. 47th IEEE Annual Symp.
on Found. of Comp. Sci. (2006). A version of it to appear in Advances in
Mathematic
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