Princeton University
Computer Science Department

Computer Science 522
Computational Complexity

Boaz Barak

Spring 2007


News:
· FINAL is now available.
· All students taking this course should join the mailing list. It's also recommended for anyone planning to go to some of the lectures. (I'll announce in advance on the mailing list the topics for each of the more advanced lectures.)


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Administrative Information

Lectures: Friday 1:20-4:30pm, Room: 301 Computer Science building

Professor: Boaz Barak - 405 CS Building. Email: Phone: 258- (I prefer email)

Graduate Coordinator: Melissa Lawson - 310 CS Building - 258-5387 mml@cs.princeton.edu

Requirements and grading: Submitting and grading weekly homework assignments (50% of grade), take home final exam (50% of final grade).

Prerequisites: There are no formal prerequisites, but I will assume some degree of mathematical maturity and familiarity with basic notions such as functions, sets, graphs, O notations, and probability on finite sample spaces. See the appendix of the book to brush up on this stuff.

FINAL: The final is now available. You may work on it on any 48 hour period of your choice ending before May 21st 10:00am. You should type up your solutions and email it to me by that date. For more detailed instructions see this document.

Click here to download the final (DO NOT download it before you are ready to start working on it.) (click here for LaTex source of final)

Course Information

This is a graduate course in computational complexity, including both "classical" results from the last few decades, and very recent results from the last few years.

Complexity theory deals with the power of efficient computation. While in the last century logicians and computer scientists developed a pretty good understanding of the power of finite time algorithms (where finite can be an algorithm that on on a 1000 bit input will take longer to run than the lifetime of the sun) our understanding of efficient algorithms is quite poor. Thus, complexity theory contains more questions, and relationships between questions, than actual answers. Nevertheless, we will learn about some fascinating insights, connections, and even few answers, that emerged from complexity theory research.

Among the questions we will tackle (for various types of computational problems) are:

I plan to include also some topics, including some results from the last couple of years. These include derandomization, expanders and extractors, Reingold's deterministic O(log n)-space algorithm for undirected s-t connectivity and the PCP theorem. A general recurring theme in this course will be the notion of obtaining combinatorial objects with random and pseudorandom properties.

Perhaps the question that will occur to you after attending this course is "How is it that all these seemingly intelligent people have been working on this for several decades and have not managed to prove even some ridiculously obvious conjectures?". The answer is that we need your help to solve some of these problems, and get rid of this embarrassing situation.


Readings:

Our main textbook will be the upcoming book Computational Complexity: A Modern Approach by Sanjeev Arora and me. Drafts of the book will be available from Pequod Copy. Whenever presenting material that is not in this book, I will provide references to the relevant research papers or other lecture notes.

Another upcoming book you might want to look at is Computational Complexity: A Conceptual Perspective by Oded Goldreich.

Some lecture notes of similar courses: Last year's offering Sanjeev Arora, Rudich and Blum, Madhu Sudan, Luca Trevisan, Russel Impagliazzo (2), Chris Umans, Oded Goldreich (see also his texts on computational complexity) Feige & Raz, Moni Naor, Valentine Kabanets, Muli Safra (2),

Pseudorandomness courses: Salil Vadhan, Luca Trevisan, David Zuckerman, Oded Goldreich, Venkat Guruswami

PCP and hardness of approximation: Uri Feige, Guruswami and Odonnell,

Other courses: Sanjeev Arora: theorist's toolkit, Madhu Sudan: essential coding theory, Linial and Wigderson: expander graphs


Homework

Homework will be given each class and are due the next class. You can submit the homework earlier but please do not submit them later. However, I will accept the homework up to the following Monday at a penalty of 30 points. Each homework assignment will be checked by 1-2 students within a week. The students checking a homework assignment are not exempt from submitting that assignment. The home work grade will be the average of all assignments. I will not drop the lowest graded assignment. However, some assignments will contain more bonus points (i.e., more than 100), and checking homework for the week will give you a 40 point bonus in that assignment (20 if 2 students are checking). I encourage you to use LaTeX to write your solutions. You might find the following short guide for LaTeX written by Dave Xiao to be useful (you might also want to look at the source files for the guide: latex-guide.tex and macros.tex). To make typing in LaTeX easier, I will provide the LaTeX source for all the homework exercises available.

Due Checker(s)
HO1 (latex source) Feb 16 David Eisenstat
HO2 (latex source) Feb 23 Indraneel Mukherjee
HO3 (latex source) Mar 2 Hossein Bateni
HO4 (latex source) Mar 9 Rajsekar Manokaran
HO5 (latex source) Mar 16 David Steurer
HO6 (latex source) Mar 30 David Eisenstat
HO7 (latex source) Apr 6 Indraneel Mukherjee
HO8 (latex source) Apr 13 Rajsekar Manokaran
HO9 (latex source) Apr 27 David Steurer
HO11 (latex source) May 4 Hossein Bateni

Lecture Notes and Handouts.

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Lecture 1: Friday, February 9, 2007
Introduction, computational model - TMs and Circuits, P, NP


Handout 1 (LaTeX source)

Additional reading: New Yorker article on Alan Turing.
Oded Goldreich's text on computational tasks and models
mathematical background


Lecture 2: Friday, February 16, 2007
NP completeness, Diagonalization, Ladner's Theorem, Limits of Relativization


Handout 2 (LaTeX source)

Surveys on NP: Please read one of the following surveys:

Additional reading: Goldreich's text on the P, NP and NP-completeness. You might also want to take a look at this powerpoint presentation on history and importance of NP,NPC etc. by Gilat Kol and Tal Kramer from Moni Naor's course on Key Papers in CS. See also this survey on diagonalization by Lance Fortnow.


Lecture 3: Friday, February 23, 2007
Probabilistic Computation and the random walk method

Definitions of BPP and its friends (RP,ZPP). Error reduction. Some examples: min-cut algorithm, polynomial identity testing. BPP in P/poly. BPP in PH. Expander graphs, random walks and randomness efficient error reduction.
Handout 3 (LaTeX source)

Reading: Chapter 7 and handout.

Additional reading: Goldreich's text on randomized complexity classes. The following books are recommended for a more in depth look at discrete probability and randomized computation:

Expander graphs: See the following excellent book by Hoory, Linial and Wigderson on expander graphs.


Lecture 4: Friday, March 2, 2007
Interactive Proofs, #P in IP

Complete error reduction via expander random walks, randomized reduction and unique SAT, interactive proofs, graph non isomorphism in IP, graph non isomorphism in AM, CoNP is contained in IP.
Handout 4 (LaTeX source)

Additional reading: You can find the story of IP=PSPACE in the following entertaining survey: Email and the Unexpected Power of Interaction by Laci Babai. . See Goldreich's text on the proof that IP[k] is in AM[k+3]. Goldreich's text on IP=PSPACE. Trevisan's lecture notes on IP=PSPACE


Lecture 5: Friday, March 9, 2007
cryptography


Handout 5 (LaTeX source)

Additional reading: A great introduction to cryptography is in the upcoming book of Katz and Lindell. See Salil Vadhan's Thesis for some fascinating insights into the class of languages with statistical (i.e., information-theoretic secure) zero knowledge proofs.


Lecture 6: Friday, March 16, 2007
Hardness vs. Randomness: Nisan-Wigderson Generator


Handout 6 (LaTeX source)

Additional reading: Lectures 11 and 12 from Trevisan's pseudorandomness course.
Goldreich's text on pseudorandom generators (relevant materials is until page 22).


Lecture 7: Friday, March 30, 2007
Hardness vs. Randomness 2: Using Worst-case assumptions , Error correcting codes


Handout 7 (LaTeX source)

Additional reading: Today's lecture was all taken from the paper "Hard-core distributions for somewhat hard problems" of Russell Impagliazzo (see also his wikipedia entry). The XOR lemma has several different proofs with varying parameters, see this survey by Goldreich, Nisan and Wigderson.

A derandomized version of the XOR lemma, that given a function on n bits only needs to move to a function on O(n+k) bits to get hardness similar to the hardness the original version's with k repetitions (and hence nk bits) was given in this paper by Impagliazzo and Wigderson. In particular, using what we've seen this paper shows how to get BPP=P from functions with 1-1/n hardness for exponential circuits. (We'll show how to get functions like that from functions that are worst-case hard next time).

I highly recommend this survey by Valentine Kabanets on derandomization. It contains brief descriptions and pointers to many of the latest results and exciting research directions of this field.

Getting to BPP=P: The "XOR Lemma free" approach to getting BPP=P was given in this paper by Sudan, Trevisan and Vadhan (STV). As mentioned before, there's a previous alternative approach by Impagliazzo and Wigderson using a "XOR Lemma on steroids". There's even a third "NW generator free" approach by Shaltiel and Umans (see below).

Hardness vs. randomness tradeoff: The results shown in class generalize to a tradeoff between the assumption on the circuit size required to compute functions in E and the resulting time to derandomize BPP. However, the currently known approach to get an optimal tradeoff (by this we mean optimal w.r.t. to "black-box" proofs) is somewhat different (and in particular uses error correcting codes but not the NW generator). This is obtained in the following two papers by Shaltiel and Umans and Umans. You can also see a PowerPoint presentation by Ronen Shaltiel on this topic.

Uniform derandomization: The result that either BPP=EXP or there's a non-trivial subexponential derandomization of BPP is from this Impagliazzo-Wigdersion 98 paper, but a more general and perhaps better proof can be found in this paper by Vadhan and Trevisan. The results that even a uniform derandomization require circuit lower bounds come from these two papers by Impagliazzo-Kabanets-Wigderson and Impagliazzo-Kabanets

Randomness extractors: Another topic we did not touch is randomness extractors which are used not to derandomize BPP but to execute probabilistic algorithms without access to truly independent and uniform coin tosses. The following survey by Ronen Shaltiel is a good starting point for information on this topic. See also the following presentation by Salil Vadhan.

More resources on derandomization and pseudorandomness: As you can see, one could make a whole course out of the topics we did not cover on pseudorandomness, and indeed there several such courses with excellent lecture notes were given. Some recommended links are: Shaltiel Trevisan Zuckerman Goldreich Vadhan


Lecture 8: Friday, April 6, 2007
PCP theorem 1 : NP in PCP(O(1),poly(n))


Handout 8 (LaTeX source) Introduction to PCP and hardness of approximation. NP in PCP with O(1) queries and poly(n) randomness. (Hadamard-based proof for Quadratic equations).

Lecture 9: Friday, April 13, 2007
PCP theorem 2: Gap amplification, Fourier, Hastad's PCP

We follow the proof of the PCP theorem in this paper by Irit Dinur. A variant of this proof is also described in these lecture notes by Guruswami and Odonnell (these two sources follow a slightly different approach, and we'll also do some things a bit different from both these sources). Fourier analysis, linearity testing, Goldreich-Levin / Kushilevitz-Mansour algorithm for learning Fourier coeefficients. Hastad's long-code test. Paper by Kushilevitz and Mansour. See also Trevisan's lecture on Goldreich-Levin algorithm.

Additional reading: See the following sources for more advanced related material:



Lecture 10: Friday, April 20, 2007
No Class: New York Area Theory Day in Columbia



Lecture 11: Friday, April 27, 2007
Parallel Repetition Lemma


Handout 11 - Proof of Parallel Repetition Lemma (LaTeX source)

Additional reading: Raz's paper, Holenstein's paper


Lecture 12: Friday, May 4, 2007
Quantum Computation

Additional reading: excellent survey by Aharonov. lecture notes by Umesh Vazirani