Limits of Minimum Circuit Size Problem as Oracle

Abstract

The Minimum Circuit Size Problem (MCSP) is known to be hard for statistical zero knowledge via a BPP-Turing reduction (Allender and Das, 2014), whereas establishing NP-hardness of MCSP via a polynomial-time many-one reduction is difficult (Murray and Williams, 2015) in the sense that it implies ZPP != EXP, which is a major open problem in computational complexity.  

In this paper, we provide strong evidence that current techniques cannot establish NP-hardness of MCSP, even under polynomial-time Turing reductions or randomized reductions: Specifically, we introduce the notion of oracle-independent reduction to MCSP, which captures all the currently known reductions.  We say that a reduction to MCSP is oracle-independent if the reduction can be generalized to a reduction to MCSP^A for any oracle A, where MCSP^A denotes an oracle version of MCSP. We prove that no language outside P is reducible to MCSP via an oracle-independent polynomial-time Turing reduction. We also show that the class of languages reducible to MCSP via an oracle-independent randomized reduction that makes at most one query is contained in AM intersect coAM. Thus, NP-hardness of MCSP cannot be established via such oracle-independent reductions unless the polynomial hierarchy collapses.  

We also extend the previous results to the case of more general reductions: We prove that establishing NP-hardness of MCSP via a polynomial-time nonadaptive reduction implies ZPP != EXP, and that establishing NP-hardness of approximating circuit complexity via a polynomial-time Turing reduction also implies ZPP != EXP. Along the way, we prove that approximating Levin's Kolmogorov complexity is provably not EXP-hard under polynomial-time Turing reductions, which is of independent interest.