We present an explicit pseudorandom generator for oblivious, read-once, permutation branching programs of constant width that can read their input bits in any order. The seed length is $O(\log^2 n)$, where $n$ is the length of the branching program. The previous best seed length known for this model was $n^{1/2+o(1)}$, ... more >>>

Three decades ago, Nisan constructed an explicit pseudorandom generator (PRG) that fools width-$n$ length-$n$ read-once branching programs (ROBPs) with error $\varepsilon$ and seed length $O(\log^2 n + \log n \cdot \log(1/\varepsilon))$ (Combinatorica 1992). Nisan's generator remains the best explicit PRG known for this important model of computation. However, a recent ... more >>>

The classic Impagliazzo--Nisan--Wigderson (INW) psesudorandom generator (PRG) (STOC `94) for space-bounded computation uses a seed of length $O(\log n \cdot \log(nwd/\varepsilon))$ to fool ordered branching programs of length $n$, width $w$, and alphabet size $d$ to within error $\varepsilon$. A series of works have shown that the analysis of the ... more >>>

Existing proofs that deduce BPL=L from circuit lower bounds convert randomized algorithms into deterministic algorithms with large constant overhead in space. We study space-bounded derandomization with minimal footprint, and ask what is the minimal possible space overhead for derandomization.
We show that $BPSPACE[S] \subseteq DSPACE[c \cdot S]$ for $c \approx ... more >>>

Let $\mathcal{L}$ be a language that can be decided in linear space and let $\epsilon >0$ be any constant. Let $\mathcal{A}$ be the exponential hardness assumption that for every $n$, membership in $\mathcal{L}$ for inputs of length~$n$ cannot be decided by circuits of size smaller than $2^{\epsilon n}$.
We ... more >>>

We study the problem of whether \emph{persistent} randomness is helpful for polynomial-time algorithms that only use \emph{logarithmic} space. In more detail, we consider the class $\searchBPLs$, of \emph{search}-problems that are solvable by a polynomial-time Probabilistic Logspace TMs with \emph{2-way} access (i.e., with multiple, as opposed to one-time, access) to a ... more >>>

Whether $BPL=L$ (which is conjectured to be equal), or even whether $BPL\subseteq NL$, is a big open problem in theoretical computer science. It is well known that $L-NC^1\subseteq L\subseteq NL\subseteq L-AC^1$. In this work we will show that $BPL\subseteq L-AC^1$, which was not known before. Our proof is based on ... more >>>