We consider the task of interactive communication in the presence of
adversarial errors and present tight bounds on the tolerable error-rates in a
number of different settings.
Most significantly, we explore adaptive interactive communication where the
communicating parties decide who should speak next based on the history of the
interaction. Braverman and Rao [STOC'11] show that non-adaptively one can code
for any constant error rate below 1/4 but not more. They asked whether this
bound could be improved using adaptivity. We answer this open question in the
affirmative (with a slightly different collection of resources): Our adaptive
coding scheme tolerates any error rate below 2/7 and we show that tolerating a
higher error rate is impossible. We also show that in the setting of Franklin
et al. [CRYPTO'13], where parties share randomness not known to the adversary,
adaptivity increases the tolerable error rate from 1/2 to 2/3. For
list-decodable interactive communications, where each party outputs a constant
size list of possible outcomes, the tight tolerable error rate is 1/2.
Our negative results hold even if the communication and computation are
unbounded, whereas for our positive results communication and computation are
polynomially bounded. Most prior work considered coding schemes with linear
amount of communication, while allowing unbounded computations. We argue that
studying tolerable error rates in this relaxed context helps to identify a
setting's intrinsic optimal error rate. We set forward a strong working
hypothesis which stipulates that for any setting the maximum tolerable error
rate is independent of many computational and communication complexity
measures. We believe this hypothesis to be a powerful guideline for the design
of simple, natural, and efficient coding schemes and for understanding the
(im)possibilities of coding for interactive communications
