In a seminal work, Nisan (Combinatorica'92) constructed a pseudorandom generator for length $n$ and width $w$ read-once branching programs with seed length $O(\log n\cdot \log(nw)+\log n\cdot\log(1/\varepsilon))$ and error $\varepsilon$. It remains a central question to reduce the seed length to $O(\log (nw/\varepsilon))$, which would prove that $\mathbf{BPL}=\mathbf{L}$. However, there has ... more >>>

We consider the query complexity of three versions of the problem of testing monomials and affine (and linear) subspaces with one-sided error, and obtain the following results:
\begin{itemize}
\item The general problem, in which the arity of the monomial (resp., co-dimension of the subspace) is not specified, has ... more >>>

The partial string avoidability problem is stated as follows: given a finite set of strings with possible ``holes'' (wildcard symbols), determine whether there exists a two-sided infinite string containing no substrings from this set, assuming that a hole matches every symbol. The problem is known to be NP-hard and in ... more >>>