We prove conditional near-quadratic running time lower bounds for approximate
Bichromatic Closest Pair with Euclidean, Manhattan, Hamming, or edit distance.
Specifically, unless the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis (SETH) is false,
for every δ>0 there exists a constant ϵ>0 such that computing a
(1+ϵ)-approximation to the Bichromatic Closest Pair requires
n2−δ time. In particular, this implies a near-linear query time for
Approximate Nearest Neighbor search with polynomial preprocessing time.
Our reduction uses the Distributed PCP framework of [ARW'17], but obtains
improved efficiency using Algebraic Geometry (AG) codes. Efficient PCPs from AG
codes have been constructed in other settings before [BKKMS'16, BCGRS'17], but
our construction is the first to yield new hardness results