We determine the exact power of two-prover inter-active proof systems introduced by Ben-Or, Goldwasser, Kilian, and Wigderson (1988). In this system, two all-powerful non-communicating provers convince a randomizing polynomial time verifier in polynomial time that the input z belongs to the language L. It was previously suspected (and proved in a relativized sense) that coNP-complete languages do not admit such proof systems. In sharp contrast, we show that the class of languages having two-prover interactive proof systems is nondeterministic exponential time. After the recent results that all languages in PSPACE have single prover interactive proofs (Lund, Fortnow, Karloff, Nisan, and Shamir), this represents a further step demonstrating the unexpectedly immense power of randomization and interaction in efficient provability. Indeed, it follows that multiple provers with coins are strictly stronger than without, since NEXP # NP. In particular, for the first time, prov-ably polynomial time intractable languages turn out to admit “efficient proof systems’’ since NEXP # P. We show that to prove membership in languages in EXP, the honest provers need the power of EXP only. A consequence, linking more standard concepts of structural complexity, states that if EX P has poly-nomial size circuits then EXP = Cg = MA. The first part of the proof of the main result ex-tends recent techniques of polynomial extrapolation of truth values used in the single prover case. The second part is a verification scheme for multilinearity of an n-variable function held by an oracle and can be viewed as an independent result on program verification. Its proof rests on combinatorial techniques including the estimation of the expansion rate of a graph.

Circumscription and the closed world assumption with its variants are well-known nonmonotonic techniques for reasoning with incomplete knowledge. Their complexity in the propositional case has been studied in detail for fragments of propositional logic. One open problem is whether the deduction problem for arbitrary propositional theories under the extended closed world assumption or under circumscription is $\Pi^P_2$-complete, i.e., complete for a class of the second level of the polynomial hierarchy. We answer this question by proving these problems $\Pi^P_2$-complete, and we show how this result applies to other variants of closed world reasoning.

. We introduce a technique of arithmetization of the process of computation in order to obtain novel characterizations of certain complexity classes via multivariate polynomials. A variety of concepts and tools of elementary algebra, such as the degree of polynomials and interpolation, becomes thereby available for the study of complexity classes. The theory to be described provides a unified framework from which powerful recent results follow naturally. The central result is a characterization of ]P in terms of arithmetic straight line programs. The consequences include a simplified proof of Toda's Theorem that PH ` P ]P ; and an infinite class of natural and potentially inequivalent functions, checkable in the sense of Blum et al. Similar characterizations of PSPACE are also given. The arithmetization technique was independently discovered by Adi Shamir. While this simultaneous discovery was driven by applications to interactive proofs, the present paper demonstrates the applicabil...

We show that if an NP-complete problem has a nonadaptive self-corrector with respect to a samplable distribution then coNP is contained in AM/poly and the polynomial hierarchy collapses to the third level. Feigenbaum and Fortnow show the same conclusion under the stronger assumption that an NP-complete problem has a non-adaptive random self-reduction. Our result

Extending a line of research initiated by Lipton, we study the complexity of computing the permanent of random n by n matrices with integer values between 0 and p - 1, for any suitably large prime p. Previous

We investigate the phenomenon of depth-reduction in commutativeand non-commutative arithmetic circuits. We prove that in the commutative setting, uniform semi-unbounded arithmetic circuits of logarithmic depth are as powerful as uniform arithmetic circuits of polynomial degree (and unrestricted depth); earlier proofs did not work in the uniform setting. This also provides a unified proof of the circuit characterizations of the class LOGCFL and its counting variant #LOGCFL. We show that AC 1 has no more power than arithmetic circuits of polynomial size and degree n O(log log n) (improving the trivial bound of n O(logn) ). Connections are drawn between TC 1 and arithmetic circuits of polynomial size and degree. Then we consider non-commutative computation. We show that over the algebra (\Sigma ; max, concat), arithmetic circuits of polynomial size and polynomial degree can be reduced to O(log 2 n) depth (and even to O(log n) depth if unbounded-fanin gates are allowed) . This...

Model counting is the classical problem of computing the number of solutions of a given propositional formula. It vastly generalizes the NP-complete problem of propositional satisfiability, and hence is both highly useful and extremely expensive to solve in practice. We present a new approach to model counting that is based on adding a carefully chosen number of so-called streamlining constraints to the input formula in order to cut down the size of its solution space in a controlled manner. Each of the additional constraints is a randomly chosen XOR or parity constraint on the problem variables, represented either directly or in the standard CNF form. Inspired by a related yet quite different theoretical study of the properties of XOR constraints, we provide a formal proof that with high probability, the number of XOR constraints added in order to bring the formula to the boundary of being unsatisfiable determines with high precision its model count. Experimentally, we demonstrate that this approach can be used to obtain good bounds on the model counts for formulas that are far beyond the reach of exact counting methods. In fact, we obtain the first non-trivial solution counts for very hard, highly structured combinatorial problem instances. Note that unlike other counting techniques, such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods, we are able to provide highconfidence guarantees on the quality of the counts obtained.

Two natural classes of counting problems that are interreducible under approximation-preserving reductions are: (i) those that admit a particular kind of ecient approximation algorithm known as an \FPRAS," and (ii) those that are complete for #P with respect to approximationpreserving reducibility. We describe and investigate not only these two classes but also a third class, of intermediate complexity, that is not known to be identical to (i) or (ii). The third class can be characterised as the hardest problems in a logically dened subclass of #P. Research Report 370, Department of Computer Science, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK. This work was supported in part by the EPSRC Research Grant \Sharper Analysis of Randomised Algorithms: a Computational Approach" and by the ESPRIT Projects RAND-APX and ALCOM-FT. y dyer@scs.leeds.ac.uk, School of Computer Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, United Kingdom. z leslie@dcs.warwick.ac.uk, http://www.dcs.warw...

We investigate the complexity of honest provers in interactive proof systems. This corresponds precisely to the complexity of oracles helping the computation of robust probabilistic oracle machines. We obtain upper bounds for languages in FewEXP and for sparse sets in NP. Further, interactive protocols with provers that are reducible to sets of low information content are considered. Specifically, if the verifier communicates only with provers in P=poly, then the accepted language is low for \Sigma p 2. In the case that the provers are polynomial-time reducible to log-sparse sets or to sets in strong-P/log then the protocol can be simulated by the verifier even without the help of provers. As a consequence we obtain new collapse results under the assumption that intractable sets reduce to sets with low information content. 1 Introduction and overview of results Two extensions of the concept of NP (as the class of languages with efficient proofs of

We show that if every NP set is polynomial-time bounded truthtable reducible to some P-selective set, then NP is contained in DTIME(2 n O(1= p log n) ). In the proof, we implement a recursive procedure that reduces the number of nondeterministic steps of a given nondeterministic computation.