A tree code is an edge-coloring of the complete infinite binary tree such that every two nodes of equal depth have a fraction - bounded away from 0 - of mismatched colors between the corresponding paths to their least common ancestor. Tree codes were introduced in a seminal work by Schulman [Schulman, 1993] and serve as a key ingredient in almost all deterministic interactive coding schemes. The number of colors effects the coding scheme’s rate. It is shown that 4 is precisely the least number of colors for which tree codes exist. Thus, tree-code-based coding schemes cannot achieve rate larger than 1/2. To overcome this barrier, a relaxed notion called palette-alternating tree codes is introduced, in which the number of colors can depend on the layer. We prove the existence of such constructs in which most layers use 2 colors - the bare minimum. The distance-rate tradeoff we obtain matches the Gilbert-Varshamov bound. Based on palette-alternating tree codes, we devise a deterministic interactive coding scheme against adversarial errors that approaches capacity. To analyze our protocol, we prove a structural result on the location of failed communication-rounds induced by the error pattern enforced by the adversary. Our coding scheme is efficient given an explicit palette-alternating tree code and serves as an alternative to the scheme obtained by [R. Gelles et al., 2016].
@InProceedings{cohen_et_al:LIPIcs.CCC.2020.11, author = {Cohen, Gil and Samocha, Shahar}, title = {{Palette-Alternating Tree Codes}}, booktitle = {35th Computational Complexity Conference (CCC 2020)}, pages = {11:1--11:29}, series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)}, ISBN = {978-3-95977-156-6}, ISSN = {1868-8969}, year = {2020}, volume = {169}, editor = {Saraf, Shubhangi}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.CCC.2020.11}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-125632}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.CCC.2020.11}, annote = {Keywords: Tree Codes, Coding Theory, Interactive Coding Scheme} }
Feedback for Dagstuhl Publishing