Abstract

In this work we study two, seemingly unrelated, notions. Locally decodable codes (LDCs) are codes that allow the recovery of each message bit from a constant number of entries of the codeword. Polynomial identity testing (PIT) is one of the fundamental problems of algebraic complexity: we are given a circuit computing a multivariate polynomial and we have to determine whether the polynomial is identically zero. We improve known results on LDCs and on polynomial identity testing and show a relation between the two notions. In particular we obtain the following results: (1) We show that if E: F n ↦ → F m is a linear LDC with two queries, then m = exp(Ω(n)). Previously this was known only for fields of size ≪ 2 n [O. Goldreich et al., Comput. Complexity, 15 (2006), pp. 263–296]. (2) We show that from every depth 3 arithmetic circuit (ΣΠΣ circuit), C, with a bounded (constant) top fan-in that computes the zero polynomial, one can construct an LDC. More formally, assume that C is minimal (no subset of the multiplication gates sums to zero) and simple (no linear function appears in all the multiplication gates). Denote by d the degree of the polynomial computed by C and by r the rank of the linear functions appearing in C. Then we can construct a linear LDC with two queries that encodes messages of length r/polylog(d) by codewords of length O(d). (3) We prove a structural theorem for ΣΠΣ circuits, with a bounded top fan-in, that

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