We study the complexity of solving succinct zero-sum games,
i.e., the
games whose payoff matrix $M$ is given implicitly by a Boolean circuit
$C$ such that $M(i,j)=C(i,j)$. We complement the known $\EXP$-hardness
of computing the \emph{exact} value of a succinct zero-sum game by
several results on \emph{approximating} the value. (1) ... more >>>

The language compression problem asks for succinct descriptions of
the strings in a language A such that the strings can be efficiently
recovered from their description when given a membership oracle for
A. We study randomized and nondeterministic decompression schemes
and investigate how close we can get to the information ... more >>>

Let $\tau(k)$ be the minimum number of arithmetic operations
required to build the integer $k \in \N$ from the constant 1.
A sequence $x_k$ is said to be ``easy to compute'' if
there exists a polynomial $p$ such that $\tau(x_k) \leq p(\log k)$
for all $k \geq ... more >>>

In 1977 Valiant proposed a graph theoretical method for proving lower
bounds on algebraic circuits with gates computing linear functions.
He used this method to reduce the problem of proving
lower bounds on circuits with linear gates to to proving lower bounds
on the rigidity of a matrix, a ... more >>>

A boolean circuit $f(x_1,\ldots,x_n)$ \emph{represents} a graph $G$
on $n$ vertices if for every input vector $a\in\{0,1\}^n$ with
precisely two $1$'s in, say, positions $i$ and $j$, $f(a)=1$
precisely when $i$ and $j$ are adjacent in $G$; on inputs with more
or less than two ... more >>>

We prove that it is not decidable on R-machines if for a fixed finite intervall [a,b) the solution of the initial value problems of systems of ordinary differetial equations have solutions over this interval. This result holds independly from assumptions about differentiability of the right sides of the ODEs. Futhermore ... more >>>

It is known \cite{BHZ87} that if every language in coNP has a
constant-round interactive proof system, then the polynomial hierarchy
collapses. On the other hand, Lund {\em et al}.\ \cite{LFKN92} have shown that
#SAT, the #P-complete function that outputs the number of satisfying
assignments of a Boolean ... more >>>

The Group Isomorphism problem consists in deciding whether two input
groups $G_1$ and $G_2$ given by their multiplication tables are
isomorphic. We first give a 2-round Arthur-Merlin protocol for the
Group Non-Isomorphism problem such that on input groups $(G_1,G_2)$
of size $n$, Arthur uses ... more >>>

We study a simple Markov chain, known as the Glauber dynamics, for generating a random <i>k</i>-coloring of a <i>n</i>-vertex graph with maximum degree &Delta;. We prove that the dynamics converges to a random coloring after <i>O</i>(<i>n</i> log <i>n</i>) steps assuming <i>k</i> &ge; <i>k</i>₀ for some absolute constant <i>k</i>₀, and either: ... more >>>

A standard property testing algorithm is required to determine
with high probability whether a given object has property
P or whether it is \epsilon-far from having P, for any given
distance parameter \epsilon. An object is said to be \epsilon-far
from having ... more >>>

We study the power of balanced regular leaf-languages.
First, we investigate (i) regular languages that are
polylog-time reducible to languages in dot-depth 1/2 and
(ii) regular languages that are polylog-time decidable.
For both classes we provide

- forbidden-pattern characterizations, and
- characterizations in terms of regular expressions.

Both ... more >>>

We consider the resolution proof complexity of propositional formulas which encode random instances of graph $k$-colorability. We obtain a tradeoff between the graph density and the resolution proof complexity.
For random graphs with linearly many edges we obtain linear-exponential lower bounds on the length of resolution refutations. For any $\epsilon>0$, ... more >>>

Following Feige, we consider the problem of
estimating the average degree of a graph.
Using ``neighbor queries'' as well as ``degree queries'',
we show that the average degree can be approximated
arbitrarily well in sublinear time, unless the graph is extremely sparse
(e.g., unless the graph has a sublinear ... more >>>

Variants of Kannan's Theorem are given where the circuits of
the original theorem are replaced by arbitrary recursively presentable
classes of languages that use advice strings and satisfy certain mild
conditions. These variants imply that $\DTIME(n^{k'})^{\NE}/n^k$
does not contain $\PTIME^{\NE}$, $\DTIME(2^{n^{k'}})/n^k$ does
not contain $\EXP$, $\SPACE(n^{k'})/n^k$ does not ... more >>>

A recursive enumerator for a function $h$ is an algorithm $f$ which
enumerates for an input $x$ finitely many elements including $h(x)$.
$f$ is an $k(n)$-enumerator if for every input $x$ of length $n$, $h(x)$
is among the first $k(n)$ elements enumerated by $f$.
If there is a $k(n)$-enumerator for ... more >>>

We analyze the efficiency of the random walk algorithm on random 3CNF instances, and prove em linear upper bounds on the running time
of this algorithm for small clause density, less than 1.63. Our upper bound matches the observed running time to within a multiplicative factor. This is the ... more >>>

Recently Schuler \cite{Sch03} presented a randomized algorithm that
solves SAT in expected time at most $2^{n(1-1/\log_2(2m))}$ up to a
polynomial factor, where $n$ and $m$ are, respectively, the number of
variables and the number of clauses in the input formula. This bound
is the best known ... more >>>

We study the diagonalization in the context of proof
complexity. We prove that at least one of the
following three conjectures is true:

1. There is a boolean function computable in E
that has circuit complexity $2^{\Omega(n)}$.

2. NP is not closed under the complement.

3. There is no ... more >>>

We study several properties of sets that are complete for NP.
We prove that if $L$ is an NP-complete set and $S \not\supseteq L$ is a p-selective sparse set, then $L - S$ is many-one-hard for NP. We demonstrate existence of a sparse set $S \in \mathrm{DTIME}(2^{2^{n}})$
such ... more >>>

We study the complexity of building
pseudorandom generators (PRGs) from hard functions.

We show that, starting from a function f : {0,1}^l -> {0,1} that
is mildly hard on average, i.e. every circuit of size 2^Omega(l)
fails to compute f on at least a 1/poly(l)
fraction of inputs, we can ... more >>>

We continue the study of the trade-off between the length of PCPs
and their query complexity, establishing the following main results
(which refer to proofs of satisfiability of circuits of size $n$):
We present PCPs of length $\exp(\tildeO(\log\log n)^2)\cdot n$
that can be verified by making $o(\log\log n)$ Boolean queries.
more >>>

We continue the study of the degree of polynomials representing threshold functions modulo 6 initiated by Barrington, Beigel and Rudich. We use the framework established by the authors relating representations by symmetric polynomials to simultaneous protocols. We show that proving bounds on the degree of Threshold functions is equivalent to ... more >>>

We initiate the study of quantifying the quantumness of
a quantum circuit by the number of gates that do not preserve
the computational basis, as a means to understand the nature
of quantum algorithmic speedups.
Intuitively, a reduction in the quantumness requires
an increase in the amount of classical computation, ... more >>>

We show necessary and sufficient conditions that
certain algebraic functions like the rank or the signature
of an integer matrix can be computed in GapL.

The Turing and many-one completeness notions for $\NP$ have been
previously separated under {\em measure}, {\em genericity}, and {\em
bi-immunity} hypotheses on NP. The proofs of all these results rely
on the existence of a language in NP with almost everywhere hardness.

In this paper we separate the same NP-completeness ... more >>>

Although a quantum state requires exponentially many classical bits to describe, the laws of quantum mechanics impose severe restrictions on how that state can be accessed. This paper shows in three settings that quantum messages have only limited advantages over classical ones.
First, we show that BQP/qpoly is contained in ... more >>>

We derive the first lower bound results on kernel sizes of parameterized problems. The same idea also allows us to sometimes "de-parameterize"
parameterized algorithms.

Aggregates are a computational model similar to circuits, but the
underlying graph is not necessarily acyclic. Logspace-uniform
polynomial-size aggregates decide exactly the languages in PSPACE;
without uniformity condition they decide the languages in
PSPACE/poly. As a measure of similarity to boolean circuits we
introduce the parameter component size. We ... more >>>

Scaled dimension has been introduced by Hitchcock et al (2003) in order to quantitatively distinguish among classes such as SIZE(2^{a n}) and SIZE(2^{n^{a}}) that have trivial dimension and measure in ESPACE.

Solovay has proven that
the minimal length of a program enumerating a set A
is upper bounded by 3 times the absolute value of the
logarithm of the
probability that a random program will enumerate A.
It is unknown whether one can replace the constant
3 by a smaller constant.
more >>>

The information contained in a string $x$ about a string $y$
is defined as the difference between the Kolmogorov complexity
of $y$ and the conditional Kolmogorov complexity of $y$ given $x$,
i.e., $I(x:y)=\C(y)-\C(y|x)$. From the well-known Kolmogorov--Levin Theorem it follows that $I(x:y)$ is symmetric up to a small ... more >>>

We present a novel method for exactly solving (in fact, counting solutions to) general constraint satisfaction optimization with at most two variables per constraint (e.g. MAX-2-CSP and MIN-2-CSP), which gives the first exponential improvement over the trivial algorithm; more precisely, it is a constant factor improvement in the base of ... more >>>

We study networks of spiking neurons that use the timing of pulses
to encode information. Nonlinear interactions model the spatial
groupings of synapses on the dendrites and describe the computations
performed at local branches. We analyze the question of how many
examples these networks must ... more >>>

We consider the general network information flow problem, which was
introduced by Ahlswede et. al. We show a periodicity effect: for
every integer m greater than 1, there exists an instance of the
network information flow problem that admits a solution if and only if
the alphabet size is a ... more >>>

We present an algorithm to invert the Euler function $\varphi(m)$. The algorithm, for a given integer $n\ge 1$, in polynomial time ``on average'', finds theset $\Psi(n)$ of all solutions $m$ to the equation $\varphi(m) =n$. In fact, in the worst case the set $\Psi(n)$ is exponentially large and cannot be ... more >>>

We give the first exponential separation between quantum and bounded-error randomized one-way communication complexity. Specifically, we define the Hidden Matching Problem HM_n: Alice gets as input a string x in {0,1}^n and Bob gets a perfect matching M on the n coordinates. Bob's goal is to output a tuple (i,j,b) ... more >>>

Given a fixed computable binary operation f, we study the complexity of the following generation problem: The input consists of strings a1,...,an,b. The question is whether b is in the closure of {a1,...,an} under operation f.

For several subclasses of operations we prove tight upper and lower bounds for the ... more >>>

Presented is an algorithm (for learning a subclass of erasing regular
pattern languages) which
can be made to run with arbitrarily high probability of
success on extended regular languages generated by patterns
$\pi$ of the form $x_0 \alpha_1 x_1 ... \alpha_m x_m$
for unknown $m$ but known $c$,
more >>>

We consider the ``minor'' and ``homeomorphic'' analogues of the maximum clique problem, i.e., the problems of determining the largest $h$ such that the input graph has a minor isomorphic to $K_h$ or a subgraph homeomorphic to $K_h,$ respectively.We show the former to be approximable within $O(\sqrt {n} \log^{1.5} n)$ by ... more >>>

Maximum-likelihood decoding is one of the central algorithmic
problems in coding theory. It has been known for over 25 years
that maximum-likelihood decoding of general linear codes is
NP-hard. Nevertheless, it was so far unknown whether maximum-
likelihood decoding remains hard for any specific family of
more >>>

DPLL (for Davis, Putnam, Logemann, and Loveland) algorithms form the largest family of contemporary algorithms for SAT (the propositional satisfiability problem) and are widely used in applications. The recursion trees of DPLL algorithm executions on unsatisfiable formulas are equivalent to tree-like resolution proofs. Therefore, lower bounds for tree-like resolution (which ... more >>>

An arithmetic circuit or formula is multilinear if the polynomial
computed at each of its wires is multilinear.
We give an explicit example for a polynomial $f(x_1,...,x_n)$,
with coefficients in $\{0,1\}$, such that over any field:
1) $f$ can be computed by a polynomial-size multilinear circuit
of depth $O(\log^2 ... more >>>

Error-correcting codes and related combinatorial constructs
play an important role in several recent (and old) results
in computational complexity theory. In this paper we survey
results on locally-testable and locally-decodable error-correcting
codes, and their applications to complexity theory and to
cryptography.

Locally decodable codes are error-correcting codes ... more >>>

We investigate the question of whether one can characterize complexity
classes (such as PSPACE or NEXP) in terms of efficient
reducibility to the set of Kolmogorov-random strings R_C.
We show that this question cannot be posed without explicitly dealing
with issues raised by the choice of universal
machine in the ... more >>>

A strong direct product theorem says that if we want to compute
k independent instances of a function, using less than k times
the resources needed for one instance, then our overall success
probability will be exponentially small in k.
We establish such theorems for the classical as well as ... more >>>

We continue the investigation of locally testable codes, i.e.,
error-correcting codes for whom membership of a given word in the
code can be tested probabilistically by examining it in very few
locations. We give two general results on local testability:
First, motivated by the recently proposed notion of robust
probabilistically ... more >>>

In this paper, we use resource-bounded dimension theory to investigate polynomial size circuits. We show that for every $i\geq 0$, $\Ppoly$ has $i$th order scaled $\pthree$-strong dimension $0$. We also show that $\Ppoly^\io$ has $\pthree$-dimension $1/2$, $\pthree$-strong dimension $1$. Our results improve previous measure results of Lutz (1992) and dimension ... more >>>

Assuming 3-SAT formulas are hard to refute
on average, Feige showed some approximation hardness
results for several problems like min bisection, dense
$k$-subgraph, max bipartite clique and the 2-catalog segmentation
problem. We show a similar result for
max bipartite clique, but under the assumption, 4-SAT formulas
are hard to refute ... more >>>

We prove upper and lower bounds for computing Merkle tree
traversals, and display optimal trade-offs between time
and space complexity of that problem.

We consider the $K$-clustering problem with the $\ell_2^2$
distortion measure, also known as the problem of optimal
fixed-rate vector quantizer design. We provide a deterministic
approximation algorithm which works for all dimensions $d$ and
which, given a data set of size $n$, computes in time
more >>>

An instance of a constraint satisfaction problem is $l$-consistent
if any $l$ constraints of it can be simultaneously satisfied.
For a set $\Pi$ of constraint types, $\rho_l(\Pi)$ denotes the largest ratio of constraints which can be satisfied in any $l$-consistent instance composed by constraints from the set $\Pi$. In the ... more >>>

In this paper, we study two questions related to
the problem of testing whether a function is close to a homomorphism.
For two finite groups $G,H$ (not necessarily Abelian),
an arbitrary map $f:G \rightarrow H$, and a parameter $0 < \epsilon <1$,
say that $f$ is $\epsilon$-close to a homomorphism ... more >>>

We consider Arthur-Merlin proof systems where (a) Arthur is a probabilistic quasi-polynomial time Turing machine
and (AMQ)(b) Arthur is a probabilistic exponential time Turing machine (AME). We prove two new results related to these classes.

Let a program p on input a output b. We are looking for a
shorter program p' having the same property (p'(a)=b). In
addition, we want p' to be simple conditional to p (this
means that the conditional Kolmogorov complexity K(p'|p) is
negligible). In the present paper, we prove that ... more >>>

Game theory has been used for a long time to study phenomena in evolutionary biology, beginning systematically with the seminal work of John Maynard Smith. A central concept in this connection has been the notion of an evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) in a symmetric two-player strategic form game. A regular ... more >>>

In this short note we show that for any integer k, there are
languages in the complexity class PP that do not have Boolean
circuits of size $n^k$.

{\bf Abstract}

Isometries on formal power series over the finite field $\ff_2$
or on $2$--adic integers can be
computed by invertible transducers on inputs from $\{0,1\}^\infty$.
We consider the structural complexity of an isometry $f$,
measured as {\it tree complexity} $T(f,h)$, $h$ the tree height
[H.~Niederreiter, M.~Vielhaber, {\it J.~Cpx.}, ... more >>>

The present work studies clustering from an abstract point of view
and investigates its properties in the framework of inductive inference.
Any class $S$ considered is given by a numbering
$A_0,A_1,...$ of nonempty subsets of the natural numbers
or the rational k-dimensional vector space as a hypothesis space.
A clustering ... more >>>

The worst-case complexity of an implementation of Quicksort depends
on the random number generator that is used to select the pivot
elements. In this paper we estimate the expected number of
comparisons of Quicksort as a function in the entropy of the random
source. We give upper and lower bounds ... more >>>

We give constructions of PCPs of length n*polylog(n) (with respect
to circuits of size n) that can be verified by making polylog(n)
queries to bits of the proof. These PCPs are not only shorter than
previous ones, but also simpler. Our (only) building blocks are
Reed-Solomon codes and the bivariate ... more >>>

A celebrated 1976 theorem of Aumann asserts that honest, rational
Bayesian agents with common priors will never "agree to disagree": if
their opinions about any topic are common knowledge, then those
opinions must be equal. Economists have written numerous papers
examining the assumptions behind this theorem. But two key questions
more >>>

We consider the P versus NP\cap coNP question for the classical two-party communication protocols: if both a boolean function and its negation have small nondeterministic communication complexity, what is then its deterministic and/or probabilistic communication complexity? In the fixed (worst) partition case this question was answered by Aho, Ullman and ... more >>>

In the mid 1980's, Yao presented a constant-round protocol for
securely computing any two-party functionality in the presence of
semi-honest adversaries (FOCS 1986). In this paper, we provide a
complete description of Yao's protocol, along with a rigorous
proof of security. Despite the importance of Yao's protocol to the
field ... more >>>

In this paper we define a many-one reduction which is allowed to work in exponential time but may only output polynomially many symbols. We show that there are no NEXP-hard sparse languages under our reduction unless EXP=UEXP.

We survey results on the hardness of approximating combinatorial
optimization problems.

Revisiting the thirty years-old notions of resource-bounded immunity and simplicity, we investigate the structural characteristics of various immunity notions: strong immunity, almost immunity, and hyperimmunity as well as their corresponding simplicity notions. We also study limited immunity and simplicity, called k-immunity and feasible k-immunity, and their simplicity notions. Finally, we ... more >>>

We present an algorithm for learning a mixture of distributions.
The algorithm is based on spectral projection and
is efficient when the components of the mixture are logconcave
distributions.

In general property testing, we are given oracle access to a function $f$, and we wish to randomly test if the function satisfies a given property $P$, or it is $\epsilon$-far from having that property. In a more general setting, the domain on which the function is defined is equipped ... more >>>

In this note we revisit the construction of high noise, almost
optimal rate list decodable code of Guruswami ("Better extractors for better codes?")
Guruswami showed that based on optimal extractors one can build a
$(1-\epsilon,O({1 \over \epsilon}))$ list decodable codes of rate
$\Omega({\epsilon \over {log{1 \over \epsilon}}})$ and alphabet
size ... more >>>

Let $p(x_1,...,x_n) =\sum_{ (r_1,...,r_n) \in I_{n,n} } a_{(r_1,...,r_n) } \prod_{1 \leq i \leq n} x_{i}^{r_{i}}$
be homogeneous polynomial of degree $n$ in $n$ real variables with integer nonnegative coefficients.
The support of such polynomial $p(x_1,...,x_n)$
is defined as $supp(p) = \{(r_1,...,r_n) \in I_{n,n} : a_{(r_1,...,r_n)} \neq 0 ... more >>>

A set is called NP-simple if it lies in NP, and its complement is infinite, and does not contain any infinite subsets in NP. Hartmanis, Li and Yesha proved that no set which is hard for NP under many-one (Karp) reductions is NP-simple unless the intersection of NP and coNP ... more >>>

Bennett and Gill (1981) proved that P^A != NP^A relative to a
random oracle A, or in other words, that the set
O_[P=NP] = { A | P^A = NP^A }
has Lebesgue measure 0. In contrast, we show that O_[P=NP] has
Hausdorff dimension 1.

... more >>>

In this paper, we show how to systematically
improve on parameterized algorithms and their
analysis, focusing on search-tree based algorithms
for d-Hitting Set, especially for d=3.
We concentrate on algorithms which are easy to implement,
in contrast with the highly sophisticated algorithms
which have been elsewhere designed to ... more >>>

We study pseudorandom generator (PRG) constructions $G^f : {0,1}^l \to {0,1}^{l+s}$ from one-way functions $f : {0,1}^n \to {0,1}^m$. We consider PRG constructions of the form $G^f(x) = C(f(q_{1}) \ldots f(q_{poly(n)}))$
where $C$ is a polynomial-size constant depth circuit
and $C$ and the $q$'s are generated from $x$ arbitrarily.
more >>>

The computational complexity of learning from binary examples is
investigated for linear threshold neurons. We introduce
combinatorial measures that create classes of infinitely many
learning problems with sample restrictions. We analyze how the
complexity of these problems depends on the values for the measures.
... more >>>

Many real-world optimization problems in, e.g., engineering
or biology have the property that not much is known about
the function to be optimized. This excludes the application
of problem-specific algorithms. Simple randomized search
heuristics are then used with surprisingly good results. In
order to understand the working principles behind such
more >>>

There are two approaches to solving a new supervised learning task: either
analyze the task independently or reduce it to a task that has already
been thoroughly analyzed. This paper investigates the latter approach for
classification problems. In addition to obvious theoretical motivations,
there is fairly strong empirical evidence that ... more >>>

A bipartite graph is biplanar if the vertices can be
placed on two parallel lines in the plane such that there are
no edge crossings when edges are drawn as straight-line segments.
We study two variants of biplanarization problems:
- Two-Layer Planarization TLP: can $k$ edges be deleted from
a ... more >>>

Constructive dimension and constructive strong dimension are effectivizations of the Hausdorff and packing dimensions, respectively. Each infinite binary sequence A is assigned a dimension dim(A) in [0,1] and a strong dimension Dim(A) in [0,1].

Let DIM^alpha and DIMstr^alpha be the classes of all sequences of dimension alpha and of strong ... more >>>

We introduce the study of Kolmogorov complexity with error. For a
metric d, we define C_a(x) to be the length of a shortest
program p which prints a string y such that d(x,y) \le a. We
also study a conditional version of this measure C_{a,b}(x|y)
where the task is, given ... more >>>

How much do we have to change a string to increase its Kolmogorov complexity. We show that we can
increase the complexity of any non-random string of length n by flipping O(sqrt(n)) bits and some strings
require
Omega(sqrt(n)) bit flips. For a given m, we also give bounds for ... more >>>

We investigate the class of disjoint NP-pairs under different reductions.
The structure of this class is intimately linked to the simulation order
of propositional proof systems, and we make use of the relationship between
propositional proof systems and theories of bounded arithmetic as the main
tool of our analysis.
more >>>

We show new lower bounds and impossibility results for general (possibly <i>non-black-box</i>) zero-knowledge proofs and arguments. Our main results are that, under reasonable complexity assumptions:
<ol>
<li> There does not exist a two-round zero-knowledge <i>proof</i> system with perfect completeness for an NP-complete language. The previous impossibility result for two-round zero ... more >>>

We reduce the approximation factor for Vertex Cover to $2-\Theta(1/\sqrt{logn})$
(instead of the previous $2-\Theta(loglogn/logn})$, obtained by Bar-Yehuda and Even,
and by Monien and Speckenmeyer in 1985. The improvement of the vanishing
factor comes as an application of the recent results of Arora, Rao, and Vazirani
that improved ... more >>>

A large body of work studies the complexity of selecting the
$j$-th largest element in an arbitrary set of $n$ elements (a.k.a.
the select$(j)$ operation). In this work, we study the
complexity of select in data that is partially structured by
an initial preprocessing stage and in a data structure ... more >>>

We study computational procedures that use both randomness and nondeterminism. Examples are Arthur-Merlin games and approximate counting and sampling of NP-witnesses. The goal of this paper is to derandomize such procedures under the weakest possible assumptions.

Our main technical contribution allows one to ``boost'' a given hardness assumption. One special ... more >>>

We revisit the problem of hardness amplification in $\NP$, as
recently studied by O'Donnell (STOC `02). We prove that if $\NP$
has a balanced function $f$ such that any circuit of size $s(n)$
fails to compute $f$ on a $1/\poly(n)$ fraction of inputs, then
$\NP$ has a function $f'$ such ... more >>>

We study the complexity of computing $k$-wise independent and
$\epsilon$-biased generators $G : \{0,1\}^n \to \{0,1\}^m$.
Specifically, we refer to the complexity of computing $G$ \emph{explicitly}, i.e.
given $x \in \{0,1\}^n$ and $i \in \{0,1\}^{\log m}$, computing the $i$-th output bit of $G(x)$.
Mansour, Nisan and Tiwari (1990) show that ... more >>>

The Metropolis algorithm is simulated annealing with a fixed temperature.Surprisingly enough, many problems cannot be solved more efficiently by simulated annealing than by the Metropolis algorithm with the best temperature. The problem of finding a natural example (artificial examples are known) where simulated annealing outperforms the Metropolis algorithm for all ... more >>>

We give an explicit construction of depth two threshold circuit with polynomial weights and $\tilde{O}(n^5)$ gates that computes an arbitrary threshold function. We also give the construction of such circuits with $O(n^3/\log n)$ gates computing the COMPARISON and CARRY functions, and that with $O(n^4/\log n)$ gates computing the ADDITION function. ... more >>>

We consider the problem of testing whether a given system of equations
over a fixed finite semigroup S has a solution. For the case where
S is a monoid, we prove that the problem is computable in polynomial
time when S is commutative and is the union of its subgroups
more >>>

A string $\alpha\in\Sigma^n$ is called {\it p-periodic},
if for every $i,j \in \{1,\dots,n\}$, such that $i\equiv j \bmod p$,
$\alpha_i = \alpha_{j}$, where $\alpha_i$ is the $i$-th place of $\alpha$.
A string $\alpha\in\Sigma^n$ is said to be $period(\leq g)$,
if there exists $p\in \{1,\dots,g\}$ such that $\alpha$ ... more >>>

Building on Barak's work (Random'02),
Fortnow and Santhanam (FOCS'04) proved a time hierarchy
for probabilistic machines with one bit of advice.
Their argument is based on an implicit translation technique,
which allow to translate separation results for short (say logarithmic)
advice (as shown by Barak) into separations for ... more >>>

We present a deterministic, log-space algorithm that solves
st-connectivity in undirected graphs. The previous bound on the
space complexity of undirected st-connectivity was
log^{4/3}() obtained by Armoni, Ta-Shma, Wigderson and
Zhou. As undirected st-connectivity is
complete for the class of problems solvable by symmetric,
non-deterministic, log-space computations (the class SL), ... more >>>

We investigate the average case complexity of a generalization of the compact knapsack problem to arbitrary rings: given $m$ (random) ring elements a_1,...,a_m in R and a (random) target value b in R, find coefficients x_1,...,x_m in S (where S is an appropriately chosen subset of R) such that a_1*x_1 ... more >>>

Using a new statistical embedding of words which has similarities with the Parikh mapping, we first construct a tolerant tester for the equality of two words, whose complexity is independent of the string size, where the distance between inputs is measured by the normalized edit distance with moves. As a ... more >>>

We give in this paper a different and simpler proof of the tractability of Mal'tsev contraints.

We show that for any constant a, ZPP/b(n) strictly contains
ZPTIME(n^a)/b(n) for some b(n) = O(log n log log n). Our techniques
are very general and give the same hierarchy for all the common
promise time classes including RTIME, NTIME \cap coNTIME, UTIME,
MATIME, AMTIME and BQTIME.

We show a ... more >>>

We show how to extract random bits from two or more independent
weak random sources, in cases where only one source is of linear
min-entropy and all other sources are of logarithmic min-entropy.
We also give improved constructions of mergers and condensers.
In all that comes below, $\delta$ is an ... more >>>

Schaefer proved in 1978 that the Boolean constraint satisfaction problem for a given constraint language is either in P or is NP-complete, and identified all tractable cases. Schaefer's dichotomy theorem actually shows that there are at most two constraint satisfaction problems, up to polynomial-time isomorphism (and these isomorphism types are ... more >>>

Assume that Alice and Bob, given an authentic channel, have a protocol where they end up with a bit S_A and S_B, respectively, such that with probability (1+eps)/2 these bits are equal. Further assume that conditioned on the event S_A = S_B no polynomial time bounded algorithm can predict the ... more >>>

We prove a new equivalence between the non-uniform and uniform complexity of exponential time. We show that EXP in NP/log if and only if EXP = P^NP|| (polynomial time with non-adaptive queries to SAT). Our equivalence makes use of a recent result due to Shaltiel and Umans showing EXP in ... more >>>

Effective fractal dimension was defined by Lutz (2003) in order to quantitatively analyze the structure of complexity classes.
Interesting connections of effective dimension with information theory were also found, in fact the cases of polynomial-space and constructive dimension can be precisely characterized in terms of Kolmogorov complexity, while analogous ... more >>>

A property tester with high probability accepts inputs satisfying a given property and rejects
inputs that are far from satisfying it. A tolerant property tester, as defined by Parnas, Ron
and Rubinfeld, must also accept inputs that are close enough to satisfying the property. We
construct properties of binary functions ... more >>>

We prove that every disjoint NP-pair is polynomial-time, many-one equivalent to
the canonical disjoint NP-pair of some propositional proof system. Therefore, the degree structure of the class of disjoint NP-pairs and of all canonical pairs is
identical. Secondly, we show that this degree structure is not superficial: Assuming there exist ... more >>>

It is well known that the hardest bit of integer multiplication is the middle bit, i.e. MUL_{n-1,n}.
This paper contains several new results on its complexity.
First, the size s of randomized read-k branching programs, or, equivalently, its space (log s) is investigated.
A randomized algorithm for MUL_{n-1,n} with k=O(log ... more >>>

We show that ACC^0 is precisely what can be computed with constant-width circuits of polynomial size and polylogarithmic genus. This extends a characterization given by Hansen, showing that planar constant-width circuits also characterize ACC^0. Thus polylogarithmic genus provides no additional computational power in this model.
We consider other generalizations of ... more >>>

We study the complexity of the isomorphism and automorphism problems for finite rings with unity.

We show that both integer factorization and graph isomorphism reduce to the problem of counting
automorphisms of rings. The problem is shown to be in the complexity class $\AM \cap co\AM$
and hence ... more >>>

Quantum finite automata have been studied intensively since
their introduction in late 1990s as a natural model of a
quantum computer with finite-dimensional quantum memory space.
This paper seeks their direct application
to interactive proof systems in which a mighty quantum prover
communicates with a ... more >>>

We prove results on the computational complexity of instances of 3SAT in which every variable occurs 3 or 4 times.

We define a collection of Prover-Delayer games that characterize certain subsystems of resolution. This allows us to give some natural criteria which guarantee lower bounds on the resolution width of a formula, and to extend these results to formulas of unbounded initial width.

We also use games to give upper ... more >>>

We give a method for approximating any $n$-dimensional
lattice with a lattice $\Lambda$ whose factor group
$\mathbb{Z}^n / \Lambda$ has $n-1$ cycles of equal length
with arbitrary precision. We also show that a direct
consequence of this is that the Shortest Vector Problem and the Closest
Vector Problem cannot ... more >>>

We present a deterministic O(log n log log n) space algorithm for
undirected s,t-connectivity. It is based on the deterministic EREW
algorithm of Chong and Lam (SODA 93) and uses the universal
exploration sequences for trees constructed by Kouck\'y (CCC 01).
Our result improves the O(log^{4/3} n) bound of Armoni ... more >>>

A statistical zero knowledge argument for NP is a cryptographic primitive that allows a polynomial-time prover to convince another
polynomial-time verifier of the validity of an NP statement. It is guaranteed that even an infinitely powerful verifier does not learn any
additional information but the validity of the claim.

Naor ... more >>>

We study in this paper the computational complexity of some
equivalence relations on polynomial systems of equations over finite
fields. These problems are analyzed with respect to polynomial-time
many-one reductions (resp. Turing reductions, Levin reductions). In
particular, we show that some of these problems are between ... more >>>

Lovasz and Schrijver described a generic method of tightening the LP and SDP relaxation for any 0-1 optimization problem. These tightened relaxations were the basis of several celebrated approximation algorithms (such as for MAX-CUT, MAX-3SAT, and SPARSEST CUT).

We prove strong nonapproximability results in this model for well-known problems such ... more >>>

We consider the problem of traversing skew (unbalanced) Merkle
trees and design an algorithm for traversing a skew Merkle tree
in time O(log n/log t) and space O(log n (t/log t)), for any choice
of parameter t\geq 2.
This algorithm can be of special interest in situations when
more >>>

Max-Satisfy is the problem of finding an assignment that satisfies
the maximum number of equations in a system of linear equations
over $\mathbb{Q}$. We prove that unless NP$\subseteq $BPP there is no
polynomial time algorithm for the problem achieving an
approximation ratio of $1/n^{1-\epsilon}$, where $n$ is the number
of ... more >>>

Alice and Bob want to know if two strings of length $n$ are
almost equal. That is, do they differ on at most $a$ bits?
Let $0\le a\le n-1$.
We show that any deterministic protocol, as well as any
error-free quantum protocol ($C^*$ version), for this problem
requires at ... more >>>

In this paper we study the complexity of Bounded Color
Multiplicity Graph Isomorphism (BCGI): the input is a pair of
vertex-colored graphs such that the number of vertices of a given
color in an input graph is bounded by $b$. We show that BCGI is in the
#L hierarchy ... more >>>