Math 268 - Logic and Complexity

Meeting times for Fall 2012: Tuesdays, 11:00-12:30, APM 6218.

First meeting: Organizational (short meeting), Tuesday, October 9th. Please email Sam to let us know your interest if you do not attend the organizational meeting.
First actual meeting: Tuesday, October 16th.

Please sign up for the piazza.com roster for the course. The piazza.com pages will be used for posting announcements about the schedule; it may optionally be used for online discussion about course topics as well.
If you need a piazza.com invitation, email at Sam at sbuss@math.ucsd.edu.

Students who are actively attending are encouraged to sign up for one unit of credit.

This will be a reading and discussion seminar course devoted to understanding some subset of the following papers leading up the Impagliazzo-Kabanets-Wigderson paper.

• [1] L. Babai, L. Fortnow, N. Nisan, and A. Wigderson. BPP has subexponential time simulations unless EXPTIME has publishable proofs. Computational Complexity, 3:307{318, 1993. PDF.
• [2] R. Impagliazzo, V. Kabanets, and A. Wigderson. In search of an easy witness: Exponential time vs. probabilistic polynomial time. Journal of Computer and System Sciences, 65(4):672{694, 2002. (preliminary version in CCC'01). PDF.
• [3] N. Nisan and A. Wigderson. Hardness vs. randomness. Journal of Computer and System Sciences, 49:149{167, 1994. PDF.
• [4] A. Shamir. IP=PSPACE. Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery, 39(4):869{877, 1992. PDF.
• [5] M. Sudan, L. Trevisan, and S. Vadhan. Pseudorandom generators without the xor lemma. J. Comput. Syst. Sci., 62(2):236{266, Mar. 2001. PDF.
• [6] L. Trevisan. Extractors and pseudorandom generators. Journal of the Association for Comput- ing Machinery, 48(4):860{879, 2001. (preliminary version in STOC'99). PDF.

Scribe Notes. These handwritten notes serve as an informal record of topics covered.

• October 6, 2012. IP=PSPACE, Shamir [4]. Lecture by Sam Buss. Scribe notes by Daniel Smith.
• October 30, 2012. Nisan-Wigderson, hardness vs psuedorandomness. NW [3] Lecture by Russell Impagliazzo. Scribe notes by Sam Buss. Alternately, scribe notes by Daniel Smith.
• November 6, 2012. EXTIME hardness and BPP simulations. BFNW [1]. Lecture by Mohan Paturi. Scribe notes by Sam Buss. Alternately, scribe notes by Daniel Smith.
• November 13, 2012. The XOR lemma and hardcores. Lecture by Russell Impagliazzo. Scribe notes by Sam Buss.
• November 20, 2012. EXPTIME=MA and Polysize Circuits Lecture by Sam Buss. Lecture notes by Sam Buss. Scribe notes by Daniel Smith.
• November 27, December 3, December 10, 2012. IKW paper. Lectures by Russell Impagliazzo. Lecture notes by Sam Buss of first two lectures, and Lecture notes by Mia Minnes of third lecture.

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