Hitting sets are as good as random coins, but I can't prove that
Speaker: TedTitle: Hitting sets are as good as random coins, but I can't prove that
Date: 05 Nov 2021 11:30-13:00 EST
Location: SEC Level 3 NW Terrace
Food: Chinese (Hunan)
Abstract: When trying to derandomize an algorithm, one natural approach is to create a pseudorandom generator. But that’s hard. Instead, we can try to create a weaker one-sided object called a hitting set generator. Interestingly, it turns out that even for algorithms with two sided error, a hitting set is often all your need for derandomization! Cheng and Hoza (CCC 2020) gave a beautiful proof of this in the space-bounded setting. I’ll talk about the ideas behind it, and how I tried (and failed) to improve their result.