Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity, Report No. 16 (2014) The Complexity of Debate Checking H. G¨okalp Demirci1, A. C. Cem Say2 and Abuzer Yakaryılmaz3,∗ 1University of Chicago, Department of Computer Science, Chicago, IL, USA 2Bo˘gazi¸ci University, Department of Computer Engineering, Bebek 34342 Istanbul,˙ Turkey 3University of Latvia, Faculty of Computing, Raina bulv. 19, R¯ıga, LV-1586 Latvia
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[email protected] Keywords: incomplete information debates, private alternation, games, probabilistic computation Abstract We study probabilistic debate checking, where a silent resource-bounded verifier reads a di- alogue about the membership of a given string in the language under consideration between a prover and a refuter. We consider debates of partial and zero information, where the prover is prevented from seeing some or all of the messages of the refuter, as well as those of com- plete information. This model combines and generalizes the concepts of one-way interactive proof systems, games of possibly incomplete information, and probabilistically checkable debate systems. We give full characterizations of the classes of languages with debates checkable by verifiers operating under simultaneous bounds of O(1) space and O(1) random bits. It turns out such verifiers are strictly more powerful than their deterministic counterparts, and allowing a logarithmic space bound does not add to this power. PSPACE and EXPTIME have zero- and partial-information debates, respectively, checkable by constant-space verifiers for any desired error bound when we omit the randomness bound. No amount of randomness can give a ver- ifier under only a fixed time bound a significant performance advantage over its deterministic counterpart.