LIPIcs.ICALP.2022.73.pdf
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The theory of proof systems in general, and interactive proofs in particular, has been immensely influential. Such proof systems allow a prover to convince a verifier whether a given statement is true or not - namely to solve a decision problem. In this work we initiate a study of interactive proofs for search problems. More precisely, we consider a setting in which a client C, given an input x, would like to find a solution y satisfying (x,y) ∈ R, for a given relation R. The client wishes to delegate this work to an (untrusted) advisor A, who has more resources than C. We seek solutions in which the communication from A is short, and, in particular, shorter than the length of the output y. (In particular, this precludes the trivial solution of the advisor sending y and then proving that (x,y) ∈ R using a standard interactive proof.) We show that such search delegation schemes exist for several problems of interest including (1) longest common subsequence (LCS) and edit distance, (2) parsing context-free grammars and (3) k-SAT.
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