English

Tighter Relations Between Sensitivity and Other Complexity Measures

Computational Complexity 2014-11-14 v1

Abstract

Sensitivity conjecture is a longstanding and fundamental open problem in the area of complexity measures of Boolean functions and decision tree complexity. The conjecture postulates that the maximum sensitivity of a Boolean function is polynomially related to other major complexity measures. Despite much attention to the problem and major advances in analysis of Boolean functions in the past decade, the problem remains wide open with no positive result toward the conjecture since the work of Kenyon and Kutin from 2004. In this work, we present new upper bounds for various complexity measures in terms of sensitivity improving the bounds provided by Kenyon and Kutin. Specifically, we show that deg(f)^{1-o(1)}=O(2^{s(f)}) and C(f) < 2^{s(f)-1} s(f); these in turn imply various corollaries regarding the relation between sensitivity and other complexity measures, such as block sensitivity, via known results. The gap between sensitivity and other complexity measures remains exponential but these results are the first improvement for this difficult problem that has been achieved in a decade.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1411.3419,
  title  = {Tighter Relations Between Sensitivity and Other Complexity Measures},
  author = {Andris Ambainis and Mohammad Bavarian and Yihan Gao and Jieming Mao and Xiaoming Sun and Song Zuo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1411.3419},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

This is the merged form of arXiv submission 1306.4466 with another work. Appeared in ICALP 2014, 14 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-22T06:57:11.622Z