Sipser and Gács, and independently Lautemann, proved in '83 that probabilistic polynomial time is contained in the second level of the polynomial-time hierarchy, i.e. BPP is in Sigma_2 P. This is essentially the only non-trivial upper bound that we have on the power of probabilistic computation. More precisely, the Sipser-Gács-Lautemann simulation shows that probabilistic time can be simulated deterministically, using two quantifiers, **with a quadratic blow-up in the running time**. That is, BPTime(t) is contained in Sigma_2 Time(t^2). In this talk we discuss whether this quadratic blow-up in the running time is necessary. We show that the quadratic blow-up is indeed necessary for black-box simulations that use two quantifiers, such as those of Sipser, Gács, and Lautemann. To obtain this result, we prove a new circuit lower bound for computing **approximate majority**, i.e. computing the majority of a given bit-string whose fraction of 1's is bounded away from 1/2 (by a constant): We show that small depth-3 circuits for approximate majority must have bottom fan-in Omega(log n). On the positive side, we obtain that probabilistic time can be simulated deterministically, using three quantifiers, in quasilinear time. That is, BPTime(t) is contained in Sigma_3 Time(t polylog t). Along the way, we show that approximate majority can be computed by uniform polynomial-size depth-3 circuits. This is a uniform version of a striking result by Ajtai that gives *non-uniform* polynomial-size depth-3 circuits for approximate majority. If time permits, we will discuss some applications of our results to proving lower bounds on randomized Turing machines.
@InProceedings{viola:DagSemProc.06111.11, author = {Viola, Emanuele}, title = {{On Probabilistic Time versus Alternating Time}}, booktitle = {Complexity of Boolean Functions}, series = {Dagstuhl Seminar Proceedings (DagSemProc)}, ISSN = {1862-4405}, year = {2006}, volume = {6111}, editor = {Matthias Krause and Pavel Pudl\'{a}k and R\"{u}diger Reischuk and Dieter van Melkebeek}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/DagSemProc.06111.11}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-6194}, doi = {10.4230/DagSemProc.06111.11}, annote = {Keywords: Probabilistic time, alternating time, polynomial-time hierarchy, approximate majority, constant-depth circuit} }
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