The PCP Theorem

Notes by Sco Alfeld

23.10.08 Suppose your professor, the innitely powerful prover, provides you with some proof. As a limited student, you wish to verify that the proof is valid. However, you do not have time to, or perhaps you do not want to, read every page of the proof. Your tactic is simple: throw all the pages of the proof in the air, catch a few, read those, and then deduce whether or not the proof as a whole is valid. We formalize this problem with the notion of a PCP system. We let P be the prover (the professor), and V be the verier (the student). The system works as follows. 1. Given an instance x of length n of some problem, P writes down a proof as a binary string. 2. V does some precomputation, looking only at x. 3. V then randomly chooses a limited set I of indexes of . 4. V then constructs a function , returning YES or NO. 5. V then gets the values of at each of the indices, passes the values through , and returns the result. We now dene the limitations of V. Vs precomputation must be done in poly(n) time. V has r(n) bits of randomness. V can look at Q(n) bits of . V can use I, but not any values of while constructing . If is valid for x, V must claim so.
1 If is not valid for x, V must claim so with at least probability 2 .

We dene the class of problems PCPr,Q such that a language L is in PCPr,Q if 1. x L implies P can write down a proof such that V can verify it in the above procedure 2. x L implies that no matter what proof P writes, V accepts it with probability at most 1 . 2 This may seem to be an odd or arbitrary way to dene a class of problems. The punch line, however, is the PCP Theorem: NP = PCP O(1), O log(n) We note that there are key dierences between the PCP approach to NP and more well known interpretations. Instead of reading in an entire proof, and verifying it directly, in the PCP system V asks P for only pieces of the full proof. From those pieces, V then guesses as to whether or not the entire proof is valid, and Vs guess is wrong with bounded probability. The PCP Theorem will not be proven in this lecture, as it would take far too long. Instead, we tie the PCP Theorem to the notion of a problem being hard to approximate. Specically, we show how the PCP Theorem is equivalent to saying for some s, GAP-3SATs is NP-hard. To do this, we now dene the problem GAP-3SATs .

Given a 3CNF formula with m clauses, we dene OPT to be the maximum number of clauses in that can be satised simultaneously. The problem of GAP-3SATs is to: output YES if OPT = m. output NO if OPT < sm. We make no restrictions on the output if sm < OPT < m. We now go on to prove that the PCP Theorem implies that there exists a constant s such that GAP3SATs is NP-hard. To do this, we show that, given the PCP theorem, there exists a reduction R from the NP-complete problem 3-Color to GAP-3SATs . Because 3-Color is in NP, and were assuming the PCP theorem, we know there exists a proof from the prover P as dened previously. We let i denote the i-th bit1 of . We think of each of the i s as a variable for a 3SAT formula. Given the input graph G, R enumerates all N = 2Q = 2O(log(n)) = poly(n) possible random strings the verier V could choose. We denote these as Q1 . . . Qpoly(n) . Each of the Qi s provides C proof locations, and a predicate . R constructs a 3CNF formula from each . Because each is a function of C variables, we know that each generated 3CNF formula has at most K = C2C clauses. To simplify the analysis, we assume that each generated 3CNF formula has K clauses. R then returns the conjunction of all the generated 3CNF formulae, yielding a total of m = N K clauses. Clearly, if G 3-Color, by the PCP Theorem, there exists a that satises all of V s checks. Thus all of the m clauses can be satised, and OPT = m as required for the reduction to be valid. If, however, G 3-Color, at least N of V s checks must fail, again by the PCP Theorem. If Qi results in 2 a failure, then we know that the 3CNF formula constructed from Qi s must be unsatisable. This means that at most K 1 clauses can be satised. Thus the total number of clauses that can be satised is: N N (K 1) + K 2 2 N 1 N K(1 ) + K 2 K 2 1 = N K(1 ) 2K 1 = m(1 ) 2k = sm =

This shows that the PCP Theorem implies that GAP-3SATs is NP-hard. We now show that GAP-3SATs being NP-hard implies the PCP Theorem. We do so by rst assuming that GAP-3SATs is NP-hard. Our assumption means that any NP-complete problem, for example 3-Color, can be reduced to GAP3SATs . This is to say that we can reduce 3-Color, with input graph G, to a 3CNF formula R(G) such that: G 3-Color R(G) has OPT = m. G 3-Color R(G) has OPT < sm. Given the existence of this reduction, we construct V and Ps proof for the PCP system. V runs the reduction above as its precomputation, giving R(G) = , a 3CNF formula with m clauses. Ps proof is the canonical representation2 of an assignment to variables in . V uses its random bits to pick a clause C of at random, and checks to see that C is satised by .
1 Note: 2

i denotes the i-th bit, not the value of the i-th bit. can be any reasonable representation, we use a canonical one only for simplicity.

Clearly, if G 3-Color, then, by the denition of R(G), any clause picked by V will be satised because OPT = m. If G 3-Color, we know that OPT < sm, again by our construction of R(G). This means that the probability that V picked an unsatised clause is less than s. Since s is constant, through repetitions of the process, we can bring the probability below 1 . 2 We have shown that the PCP Theorem is equivalent to saying that GAP-3SATs is NP-hard. We now change the tone to a discussion of the PCP Theorem at a higher level. One key aspect of the PCP Theorem is that V needs only to look at a constant number of bits of the proof. We now turn our eorts to providing some rough intuition as to why it is possible to verify a proof, potentially very long, looking at only a constant number of bits. Suppose we have the following game. Alice has a number n I, and Bob is trying to nd out what n is. Bob knows 0 n 10, but can only look at n through fuzzy glasses. While in the PCP system this is saying Bob can only read a constant number of bits of n, in this game we say he can only read Alice within ve. This is to say that when Bob attempts to read a number q from Alice, he receives q = q 5. The question is how can Bob accurately determine the value of n. A key principle aiding Bob is that a problem being in PCPr,Q means that Pcan write a proof that V can verify. In our game, Bob can simply request that Alice multiply n by some number, say, 100. Now, Bob asks Alice for her number, and receives 100n 5, which can easily be decoded to n. By taking the original space of possible proofs, and projecting it into a larger space, we are able to cause valid proofs to be spread out. Then, by obtaining only a rough sense of their location in the larger space, we can ascertain the original proof. While the Alice and Bob game has a distance measure of numerical dierence, the distance used for proofs would be a measure of how many bits dier between any two proofs.

Credits:
This lecture was largely based on the rst lectures of Venkatesan Guruswami and Ryan ODonnells class The PCP Theorem and Hardness of Approximation class at the University of Washington, Autumn, 2005.