Small-bias probability spaces have wide applications in pseudorandomness which naturally leads to the study of their limitations. Constructing a polynomial complexity hitting set for read-once CNF formulas is a basic open problem in pseudorandomness. We show in this paper that this goal is not achievable using small-bias spaces. Namely, we ... more >>>

Mulmuley recently gave an explicit version of Noether's Normalization lemma for ring of invariants of matrices under simultaneous conjugation, under the conjecture that there are deterministic black-box algorithms for polynomial identity testing (PIT). He argued that this gives evidence that constructing such algorithms for PIT is beyond current techniques. In ... more >>>

The $\epsilon$-approximate degree of a Boolean function $f: \{-1, 1\}^n \to \{-1, 1\}$ is the minimum degree of a real polynomial that approximates $f$ to within $\epsilon$ in the $\ell_\infty$ norm. We prove several lower bounds on this important complexity measure by explicitly constructing solutions to the dual of an ... more >>>