In the last few days, a Denial of Service attack was launched on universities in Israel, leading the administrators of the Israel Academic network to block access to it from the global internet. Consequently, websites such as ECCC have been accessible only from within the Israeli and European academic networks.
It seems that this blocking was just removed, and we hope it will not be put back in the future.
Needless to say, deciding on such blocking is not in our control, but we do apologize for this disruption of service.
We prove that $\mathrm{deg}(f) \leq 2 \, \mathrm{rdeg}(f)^4$ for every Boolean function $f$, where $\mathrm{deg}(f)$ is the degree of $f$ and $\mathrm{rdeg}(f)$ is the rational degree of $f$. This resolves the second of the three open problems stated by Nisan and Szegedy, and attributed to Fortnow, in 1994.
more >>>We present a new, simplified proof that the complexity class BPP is contained in the Polynomial Hierarchy (PH), using $k$-wise independent hashing as the main tool. We further extend this approach to recover several other previously known inclusions between complexity classes. Our techniques are inspired by the work of Bellare, ... more >>>
Let $g(X)$ be a polynomial over a finite field ${\mathbb F}_q$ with degree $o(q^{1/2})$, and let $\chi$ be the quadratic residue character. We give a polynomial time algorithm to recover $g(X)$ (up to perfect square factors) given the values of $\chi \circ g$ on ${\mathbb F}_q$, with up to a ... more >>>
