The Aldous--Lyons Conjecture II: Undecidability

TL;DR

This paper proves the undecidability of distinguishing certain tailored non-local games, leading to a negative resolution of the Aldous--Lyons conjecture and implications for non-sofic unimodular networks.

Contribution

It introduces a novel undecidability result for tailored non-local games, adapting compression techniques and answer reduction methods from quantum complexity theory.

Findings

Undecidability of distinguishing perfect strategies in tailored non-local games.

Existence of non-sofic unimodular networks.

Reproof of the negation of Connes' embedding problem.

Abstract

This paper, and its companion [BCLV24], are devoted to a negative resolution of the Aldous--Lyons Conjecture [AL07, Ald07]. In this part we study tailored non-local games. This is a subclass of non-local games -- combinatorial objects which model certain experiments in quantum mechanics, as well as interactive proofs in complexity theory. Our main result is that, given a tailored non-local game $G$, it is undecidable to distinguish between the case where $G$ has a special kind of perfect strategy, and the case where every strategy for $G$ is far from being perfect. Using a reduction introduced in the companion paper [BCLV24], this undecidability result implies a negative answer to the Aldous--Lyons conjecture. Namely, it implies the existence of unimodular networks that are non-sofic. To prove our result, we use a variant of the compression technique developed in MIP*=RE [JNV+21]. Our main technical contribution is to adapt this technique to the class of tailored non-local games. The main difficulty is in establishing answer reduction, which requires a very careful adaptation of existing techniques in the construction of probabilistically checkable proofs. As a byproduct, we are reproving the negation of Connes' embedding problem [Con76] -- i.e., the existence of a $\mathrm{II}_1$-factor which cannot be embedded in an ultrapower of the hyperfinite $\mathrm{II}_1$-factor -- first proved in [JNV+21], using an arguably more streamlined proof. In particular, we incorporate recent simplifications from the literature [dlS22b, Vid22] due to de la Salle and the third author.