## Thursday, August 14, 2014

### Favorite Theorems: Limited Independence

When can limited randomness act as well as true random bits?
Polylogarithmic independence fools AC0 circuits by Mark Braverman (JACM 2010)
To explain this result consider choosing uniformly from among the following four strings:
000 110 101 011
If we look at any two of the bits, say the first and third, all four possibilities 00 10 11 01 occur. The sequence is thus 2-wise independent. We can get 2-wise independence using only two random bits to choose one of the four strings. In general one can get k-wise independent in n-bit strings using O(k2 log n) random bits.

Braverman shows that any polylogarithmic independent distribution fools polynomial-size constant-depth circuits (AC0), or more precisely for a size s depth d circuit C, for k=(log (m/ε))O(d2), the probability that C will output 1 with uniformly-random inputs will differ at most ε from the probability C outputs 1 from inputs chosen from a k-wise random distribution. Braverman's result followed after Bazzi and Razborov proved a similar result for depth-2 circuits (CNF formulas).

Another nice result along these lines: Ilias Diakonikolas, Parikshit Gopalan, Ragesh Jaiswal, Rocco Servedio and Emanuele Viola show that Bounded Independence Fools Halfspaces. A half-space is just a weighted threshold function (is the sum of wixi at most some given θ). Diakonikolas et al. show that one can fool halfspaces with k=O(ε-2log2(1/ε)), in particular for constant ε, k is a constant independent of the number of variables.