Testing Membership in Languages that Have Small Width Branching Programs

  • Authors:
  • Ilan Newman

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • SIAM Journal on Computing
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

Combinatorial property testing, initiated formally by Goldreich, Goldwasser, and Ron in [J. ACM, 45 (1998), pp. 653--750] and inspired by Rubinfeld and Sudan [SIAM J. Comput., 25 (1996), pp. 252--271], deals with the following relaxation of decision problems: Given a fixed property and an input x, one wants to decide whether x has the property or is "far" from having the property.The main result here is that, if ${\cal G}= \{ g_n:\{0,1\}^n \rightarrow \{0,1\} \}$ is a family of Boolean functions which have oblivious read-once branching programs of width w, then, for every n and $\epsilon 0$, there is a randomized algorithm that always accepts every $x \in \{0,1\}^n$ if $g_n(x)=1$ and rejects it with high probability if at least $\epsilon n$ bits of $x$ should be modified in order for it to be in gn-1(1). The algorithm makes $(\frac{2^{w}}{\epsilon})^{O(w)}$ queries. In particular, for constant $\epsilon$ and w, the query complexity is O(1). This generalizes the results of Alon et al.\ [Proceedings of the40th IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, IEEE Computer Society, 1999, pp. 645--655] asserting that regular languages are $\epsilon$-testable for every $\epsilon 0$.