On Separation between the Degree of a Boolean Function and the Block Sensitivity

TL;DR

This paper improves known lower bounds on the separation between the degree and block sensitivity of Boolean functions, providing tighter relationships and analyzing properties of specific functions to advance understanding of complexity measures.

Contribution

The paper introduces improved lower bounds for the degree versus block sensitivity separation and analyzes properties of a conjectured fully sensitive function.

Findings

Enhanced lower bounds: d^2(f) ≥ (√10 - 2) bs(f)

Improved approximate degree separation: deg_{1/3}^2(f) ≥ √(6/101) bs(f)

Characterization of symmetrized polynomials for a specific 10-variable function

Abstract

In this paper we study the separation between two complexity measures: the degree of a Boolean function as a polynomial over the reals and its block sensitivity. We show that separation between these two measures can be improved from $ d^2(f) \geq bs(f) $, established by Tal, to $ d^2(f) \geq (\sqrt{10} - 2)bs(f) $. As a corollary, we show that separations between some other complexity measures are not tight as well, for instance, we can improve recent sensitivity conjecture result by Huang to $s^4(f) \geq (\sqrt{10} - 2)bs(f)$. Our techniques are based on paper by Nisan and Szegedy and include more detailed analysis of a symmetrization polynomial. In our next result we show the same type of improvement in the separation between the approximate degree of a Boolean function and its block sensitivity: we show that $deg_{1/3}^2(f) \geq \sqrt{6/101} bs(f)$ and improve the previous result by Nisan and Szegedy $ deg_{1/3}(f) \geq \sqrt{bs(f)/6} $. In addition, we construct an example which shows that gap between constants in the lower bound and in the known upper bound is less than $0.2$. In our last result we study the properties of conjectured fully sensitive function on 10 variables of degree 4, existence of which would lead to improvement of the biggest known gap between these two measures. We prove that there is the only univariate polynomial that can be achieved by symmetrization of this function by using the combination of interpolation and linear programming techniques.