We show that one-way functions exist if and only there exists an efficient distribution relative to which almost-optimal compression is hard on average. The result is obtained by combining a theorem of Ilango, Ren, and Santhanam [STOC 2022] and one by Bauwens and Zimand [JACM, 2023].

The classical coding theorem in Kolmogorov complexity states that if an $n$-bit string $x$ is sampled with probability $\delta$ by an algorithm with prefix-free domain then K$(x) \leq \log(1/\delta) + O(1)$. In a recent work, Lu and Oliveira [LO21] established an unconditional time-bounded version of this result, by showing that ... more >>>

We show that the mutual information, in the sense of Kolmogorov complexity, of any pair of strings
$x$ and $y$ is equal, up to logarithmic precision, to the length of the longest shared secret key that
two parties, one having $x$ and the complexity profile of the pair and the ... more >>>

A $c$-short program for a string $x$ is a description of $x$ of length at most $C(x) + c$, where $C(x)$ is the Kolmogorov complexity of $x$. We show that there exists a randomized algorithm that constructs a list of $n$ elements that contains a $O(\log n)$-short program for $x$. ... more >>>

Given a machine $U$, a $c$-short program for $x$ is a string $p$ such that $U(p)=x$ and the length of $p$ is bounded by $c$ + (the length of a shortest program for $x$). We show that for any universal machine, it is possible to compute in polynomial time on ... more >>>

We show that if DTIME[2^{O(n)}] is not included in DSPACE}[2^{o(n)}], then, for every set B in PSPACE, all strings x in B of length n can be represented by a string compressed(x) of length at most log (|B^{=n}|) + O(log n), such that a polynomial-time algorithm, given compressed(x), can distinguish ... more >>>

Trevisan has shown that constructions of pseudo-random generators from
hard functions (the Nisan-Wigderson approach) also produce extractors.
We show that constructions of pseudo-random generators from one-way permutations
(the Blum-Micali-Yao approach) can be used for building extractors as well.
Using this new technique we build extractors that ... more >>>

We present a weaker variant of the PCP Theorem that admits a
significantly easier proof. In this
variant the prover only has $n^t$ time to compute each
bit of his answer, for an arbitray but fixed constant
$t$, in contrast to
being all powerful. We show that
3SAT ... more >>>