English

On extracting common random bits from correlated sources

Information Theory 2011-09-26 v2 math.IT

Abstract

Suppose Alice and Bob receive strings of unbiased independent but noisy bits from some random source. They wish to use their respective strings to extract a common sequence of random bits with high probability but without communicating. How many such bits can they extract? The trivial strategy of outputting the first kk bits yields an agreement probability of (1\eps)k<21.44k\eps(1 - \eps)^k < 2^{-1.44k\eps}, where \eps\eps is the amount of noise. We show that no strategy can achieve agreement probability better than 2k\eps/(1\eps)2^{-k\eps/(1 - \eps)}. On the other hand, we show that when k10+2(1\eps)/\epsk \geq 10 + 2 (1 - \eps) / \eps, there exists a strategy which achieves an agreement probability of 0.1(k\eps)1/22k\eps/(1\eps)0.1 (k\eps)^{-1/2} \cdot 2^{-k\eps/(1 - \eps)}.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1007.2315,
  title  = {On extracting common random bits from correlated sources},
  author = {Andrej Bogdanov and Elchanan Mossel},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1007.2315},
  year   = {2011}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-21T15:47:58.765Z