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There has been a line of work trying to characterize BPP (the class of languages that are solvable by efficient randomized algorithms) by efficient nonadaptive reductions to the set of Kolmogorov-random strings: Buhrman, Fortnow, Koucký, and Loff (CCC 2010 [Buhrman et al., 2010]) showed that every language in BPP is reducible to the set of random strings via a polynomial-time nonadaptive reduction (irrespective of the choice of a universal Turing machine used to define Kolmogorov-random strings). It was conjectured by Allender (CiE 2012 [Allender, 2012]) and others that their lower bound is tight when a reduction works for every universal Turing machine; i.e., "the only way to make use of random strings by a nonadaptive polynomial-time algorithm is to derandomize BPP."
In this paper, we refute this conjecture under the plausible assumption that the exponential-time hierarchy does not collapse, by showing that the exponential-time hierarchy EXPH can be solved in exponential time by nonadaptively asking the oracle whether a string is Kolmogorov-random or not. In addition, we provide an exact characterization of S_2^{exp} in terms of exponential-time-computable nonadaptive reductions to arbitrary dense subsets of random strings.
@InProceedings{hirahara:LIPIcs.ITCS.2020.41,
author = {Hirahara, Shuichi},
title = {{Unexpected Power of Random Strings}},
booktitle = {11th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2020)},
pages = {41:1--41:13},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-134-4},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2020},
volume = {151},
editor = {Vidick, Thomas},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ITCS.2020.41},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-117262},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ITCS.2020.41},
annote = {Keywords: Kolmogorov-Randomness, Nonadaptive Reduction, BPP, Symmetric Alternation}
}