Search-To-Decision Reductions for Kolmogorov Complexity

Authors Noam Mazor, Rafael Pass



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Noam Mazor
  • Tel Aviv University, Israel
Rafael Pass
  • Tel Aviv University, Israel
  • Cornell Tech, New York, NY, USA

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Noam Mazor and Rafael Pass. Search-To-Decision Reductions for Kolmogorov Complexity. In 39th Computational Complexity Conference (CCC 2024). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 300, pp. 34:1-34:20, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024)
https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.CCC.2024.34

Abstract

A long-standing open problem dating back to the 1960s is whether there exists a search-to-decision reduction for the time-bounded Kolmogorov complexity problem - that is, the problem of determining whether the length of the shortest time-t program generating a given string x is at most s. In this work, we consider the more "robust" version of the time-bounded Kolmogorov complexity problem, referred to as the GapMINKT problem, where given a size bound s and a running time bound t, the goal is to determine whether there exists a poly(t,|x|)-time program of length s+O(log |x|) that generates x. We present the first non-trivial search-to-decision reduction R for the GapMINKT problem; R has a running-time bound of 2^{ε n} for any ε > 0 and additionally only queries its oracle on "thresholds" s of size s+O(log |x|). As such, we get that any algorithm with running-time (resp. circuit size) 2^{α s} poly(|x|,t,s) for solving GapMINKT (given an instance (x,t,s), yields an algorithm for finding a witness with running-time (resp. circuit size) 2^{(α+ε) s} poly(|x|,t,s). Our second result is a polynomial-time search-to-decision reduction for the time-bounded Kolmogorov complexity problem in the average-case regime. Such a reduction was recently shown by Liu and Pass (FOCS'20), heavily relying on cryptographic techniques. Our reduction is more direct and additionally has the advantage of being length-preserving, and as such also applies in the exponential time/size regime. A central component in both of these results is the use of Kolmogorov and Levin’s Symmetry of Information Theorem.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Computational complexity and cryptography
Keywords
  • Kolmogorov complexity
  • search to decision

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