Department of Computer Science | Institute of Theoretical Computer Science | CADMO

Theory of Combinatorial Algorithms

Prof. Emo Welzl and Prof. Bernd Gärtner

Mittagsseminar (in cooperation with A. Steger, D. Steurer and B. Sudakov)

Mittagsseminar Talk Information

Date and Time: Tuesday, November 18, 2008, 12:15 pm

Duration: This information is not available in the database

Location: OAT S15/S16/S17

Speaker: Robin Künzler

The Power of Interactive Proofs, IP = PSPACE

When we talk about proving, we naturally think of proofs that can be written down on a sheet of paper. Someone who wants to verify such a proof then looks at it and decides whether it is valid or not. This idea is closely related to the complexity class NP, which contains exactly the languages for which efficiently verifiable proofs of membership exist.

Tomorrow we want to investigate a more general notion of a proof. Namely, we now consider a prover that is allowed to interact with the (efficient and probabilistic) verifier in order to convince him that a claim is true. Are these interactive proofs stronger than the "usual proofs"? Quite surprisingly, they seem to be a lot stronger: Namely, Shamir showed that any language in PSPACE has interactive proofs!

We first discuss an interactive protocol for proving that a Boolean formula is unsatisfiable and then look at the proof of IP = PSPACE.


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