One powerful theme in complexity theory and pseudorandomness in the past few decades has been the use of lower bounds to give pseudorandom generators (PRGs). However, the general results using this hardness vs. randomness paradigm suffer a quantitative loss in parameters, and hence do not give nontrivial implications for models ... more >>>

There has been considerable interest lately in the complexity of distributions. Recently, Lovett and Viola (CCC 2011) showed that the statistical distance between a uniform distribution over a good code, and any distribution which can be efficiently sampled by a small bounded-depth AC0 circuit, is inverse-polynomially close to one. That ... more >>>

We give the first time-space tradeoff lower bounds for Resolution proofs that apply to superlinear space. In particular, we show that there are formulas of size $N$ that have Resolution refutations of space and size each roughly $N^{\log_2 N}$ (and like all formulas have Resolution refutations of space $N$) for ... more >>>

We give a simple combinatorial proof of the Chernoff-Hoeffding concentration bound~\cite{Chernoff, Hof63}, which says that the sum of independent $\{0,1\}$-valued random variables is highly concentrated around the expected value. Unlike the standard proofs,
our proof does not use the method of higher moments, but rather uses a simple and ... more >>>

We present two new approximation algorithms for Unique Games. The first generalizes the results of Arora, Khot, Kolla, Steurer, Tulsiani, and Vishnoi who give polynomial time approximation algorithms for graphs with high conductance. We give a polynomial time algorithm assuming only good local conductance, i.e. high conductance for small subgraphs. ... more >>>

The “direct product code” of a function f gives its values on all k-tuples (f(x1), . . . , f(xk)).
This basic construct underlies “hardness amplification” in cryptography, circuit complexity and
PCPs. Goldreich and Safra [GS00] pioneered its local testing and its PCP application. A recent
result by Dinur and ... more >>>

We propose a model called priority branching trees (pBT ) for backtracking and dynamic
programming algorithms. Our model generalizes both the priority model of Borodin, Nielson
and Rackoff, as well as a simple dynamic programming model due to Woeginger, and hence
spans a wide spectrum of algorithms. After witnessing the ... more >>>

The classical Direct-Product Theorem for circuits says
that if a Boolean function $f:\{0,1\}^n\to\{0,1\}$ is somewhat hard
to compute on average by small circuits, then the corresponding
$k$-wise direct product function
$f^k(x_1,\dots,x_k)=(f(x_1),\dots,f(x_k))$ (where each
$x_i\in\{0,1\}^n$) is significantly harder to compute on average by
slightly smaller ... more >>>

We consider extensions of the DPLL approach to satisfiability testing that add a version of memoization, in which formulas that the algorithm has previously shown to be unsatisfiable are remembered for later use. Such formula caching algorithms have been suggested for satisfiability and stochastic satisfiability. We formalize these methods by ... more >>>

Diagonalization is a powerful technique in recursion theory and in
computational complexity \cite{For00}. The limits of this technique are
not clear. On the one hand, many people argue that conflicting
relativizations mean a complexity question cannot be resolved using only
diagonalization. On the other hand, it is not clear that ... more >>>

Borodin, Nielsen, and Rackoff gave a model of greedy-like algorithms for scheduling problems and Angelopoulos and Borodin extended their work to facility location and set cover problems. We generalize their notion to include other optimization problems, and apply the generalized framework to graph problems. Our goal is to define an ... more >>>

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 >>>

We show that derandomizing Polynomial Identity Testing is,
essentially, equivalent to proving circuit lower bounds for
NEXP. More precisely, we prove that if one can test in polynomial
time (or, even, nondeterministic subexponential time, infinitely
often) whether a given arithmetic circuit over integers computes an
identically zero polynomial, then either ... more >>>

Informally, an <i>obfuscator</i> <b>O</b> is an (efficient, probabilistic)
"compiler" that takes as input a program (or circuit) <b>P</b> and
produces a new program <b>O(P)</b> that has the same functionality as <b>P</b>
yet is "unintelligible" in some sense. Obfuscators, if they exist,
would have a wide variety of cryptographic ... more >>>

We give the first construction of a pseudo-random generator with
optimal seed length that uses (essentially) arbitrary hardness.
It builds on the novel recursive use of the NW-generator in
a previous paper by the same authors, which produced many optimal
generators one of which was pseudo-random. This is achieved ... more >>>

We present the best known separation
between tree-like and general resolution, improving
on the recent $\exp(n^\epsilon)$ separation of \cite{BEGJ98}.
This is done by constructing a natural family of contradictions, of
size $n$, that have $O(n)$-size resolution
refutations, but only $\exp (\Omega(n/\log n))$-size tree-like refutations.
This result ... more >>>

Razborov~\cite{Razborov96} recently proved that polynomial
calculus proofs of the pigeonhole principle $PHP_n^m$ must have
degree at least $\ceiling{n/2}+1$ over any field. We present a
simplified proof of the same result. The main
idea of our proof is the same as in the original proof
of Razborov: we want to describe ... more >>>