Efficiently Approximable Real-Valued Functions
Valentine Kabanets, Charles Rackoff, Stephen A Cook · 2000
We consider a class, denoted APP, of real-valued functions f : f0; 1g n ! [0; 1] such that f can be approximated, to within any ffl ? 0, by a probabilistic Turing machine running in time poly(n; 1=ffl). We argue that APP can be viewed as a generalization of BPP, and show that APP contains a natural complete problem: computing the acceptance probability of a given Boolean circuit; in contrast, no complete problems are known for BPP. We observe that all known complexity-theoretic assumptions under which BPP is easy (i.e., can be efficiently derandomized) imply that APP is easy; on the other hand, we show that BPP may be easy while APP is not, by constructing an appropriate oracle. 1 Introduction The complexity class BPP is traditionally considered a class of languages that can be efficiently decided with the help of randomness. While it does contain some natural problems, the "semantic" nature of its definition (on every input, a BPP machine must have either at least 3=4 or at...