2026-07-25T06:06:24Z https://drops.dagstuhl.de/oai

oai:drops-oai.dagstuhl.de:20430 2024-07-15T12:26:46Z ddc:004 open_access

Search-To-Decision Reductions for Kolmogorov Complexity Mazor, Noam Pass, Rafael Kolmogorov complexity search to decision 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. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Noam Mazor and Rafael Pass 2024 Is Part Of LIPIcs, Volume 300, 39th Computational Complexity Conference (CCC 2024) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.CCC.2024.34 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-204308 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.CCC.2024.34 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode