English

Derandomizing from Random Strings

Computational Complexity 2009-12-17 v1

Abstract

In this paper we show that BPP is truth-table reducible to the set of Kolmogorov random strings R_K. It was previously known that PSPACE, and hence BPP is Turing-reducible to R_K. The earlier proof relied on the adaptivity of the Turing-reduction to find a Kolmogorov-random string of polynomial length using the set R_K as oracle. Our new non-adaptive result relies on a new fundamental fact about the set R_K, namely each initial segment of the characteristic sequence of R_K is not compressible by recursive means. As a partial converse to our claim we show that strings of high Kolmogorov-complexity when used as advice are not much more useful than randomly chosen strings.

Cite

@article{arxiv.0912.3162,
  title  = {Derandomizing from Random Strings},
  author = {Harry Buhrman and Lance Fortnow and Michal Koucký and Bruno Loff},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0912.3162},
  year   = {2009}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-21T14:24:38.892Z