This paper studies the interaction of oracles with algorithmic approaches to proving circuit complexity lower bounds, establishing new results on two different kinds of questions.

1. We revisit some prominent open questions in circuit lower bounds, and provide a clean way of viewing them as circuit upper bound questions. Let ... more >>>

Kol and Raz [STOC 2013] showed how to simulate any alternating two-party communication protocol designed to work over the noiseless channel, by a protocol that works over a stochastic channel that corrupts each sent symbol with probability $\epsilon>0$ independently, with only a $1+\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{\H(\epsilon)})$ blowup to the communication. In particular, this ... more >>>

We prove a lower bound on the communication complexity of computing the $n$-fold xor of an arbitrary function $f$, in terms of the communication complexity and rank of $f$. We prove that $D(f^{\oplus n}) \geq n \cdot \Big(\frac{\Omega(D(f))}{\log rk(f)} -\log rk(f)\Big )$, where here $D(f), D(f^{\oplus n})$ represent the ... more >>>