Constraint satisfaction problems are some of the most well-studied NP-hard problems, 3SAT being a prominent example. It is known by Hastad's 1997 result that 3SAT is "approximation resistant" in the following sense: given a near-satisfiable instance, a trivial algorithm that assigns random boolean values to the variables satisfies 7/8 fraction of the constraints and no efficient algorithm can do strictly better unless P=NP! 3SAT is a CSP that corresponds to the ternary OR predicate. In general, a CSP has constraints given by some fixed predicate P:{0,1}^k -> {True, False} (on possibly negated variables) and the predicate is called approximation resistant if, on a near-satisfiable instance, it is computationally hard to perform strictly better than a random assignment. The quest to understand approximation resistance has played a central role in the theory of probabilistically checkable proofs (PCPs) and hardness of approximation. This talk will give a survey of the topic, including recent work giving a complete characterization of approximation resistance (i.e. a necessary and sufficient condition on the predicate that makes the corresponding CSP approximation resistant).
@InProceedings{khot:LIPIcs.FSTTCS.2013.19, author = {Khot, Subhash}, title = {{On Approximation Resistance of Predicates}}, booktitle = {IARCS Annual Conference on Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science (FSTTCS 2013)}, pages = {19--19}, series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)}, ISBN = {978-3-939897-64-4}, ISSN = {1868-8969}, year = {2013}, volume = {24}, editor = {Seth, Anil and Vishnoi, Nisheeth K.}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.FSTTCS.2013.19}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-44011}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.FSTTCS.2013.19}, annote = {Keywords: Approximation resistance, Hardness of approximation, Probabilistically checkable proofs, Constraint satisfaction problem} }
Feedback for Dagstuhl Publishing