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Does Looking Inside a Circuit Help?

Authors Russell Impagliazzo, Valentine Kabanets, Antonina Kolokolova, Pierre McKenzie, Shadab Romani

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Keywords
  • Black-Box Hypothesis
  • Rice's theorem
  • circuit complexity
  • SAT
  • sensitivity of boolean functions
  • decision tree complexity

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Abstract

The Black-Box Hypothesisstates that any property of Boolean functions decided efficiently (e.g., in BPP)  with inputs represented by circuits can also be decided efficiently in the black-box setting, where an algorithm is given an oracle access to the input function and an upper bound on its circuit size. If this hypothesis is true, then P neq NP. We focus on the consequences of the hypothesis being false, showing that (under general conditions on the structure of a counterexample) it implies a non-trivial algorithm for CSAT. More specifically, we show that if there is a property F of boolean functions such that F has high sensitivity on some input function f of subexponential circuit complexity (which is a sufficient condition for F being a counterexample to the Black-Box Hypothesis), then CSAT  is solvable by a subexponential-size circuit family. Moreover, if such a counterexample F is symmetric, then CSAT is in Ppoly. These results provide some evidence towards the conjecture (made in this paper) that the Black-Box Hypothesis is false if and only if CSAT is easy.

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Russell Impagliazzo, Valentine Kabanets, Antonina Kolokolova, Pierre McKenzie, and Shadab Romani. Does Looking Inside a Circuit Help?. In 42nd International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (MFCS 2017). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 83, pp. 1:1-1:13, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2017) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.MFCS.2017.1

Author Details

Russell Impagliazzo
Valentine Kabanets
Antonina Kolokolova
Pierre McKenzie
Shadab Romani

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