Abstract
We consider the problem of elimination in communication complexity, that was first raised by Ambainis et al. and later studied by Beimel et al. [4] for its connection to the famous direct sum question. In this problem, let f be any boolean function.
Alice and Bob get k inputs x_1, . . . , x_k and y_1, . . . , y_k respectively. They want to output a k-bit vector v, such that there exists one index i for which v_i is not equal to f(x_i, y_i).
We prove a general result lower bounding the randomized communication complexity of the elimination problem for f using its discrepancy. Consequently, we obtain strong lower bounds for the functions InnerProduct and Greater-Than, that work for exponentially larger values of k than the best previous bounds.
To prove our result, we use a pseudo-random notion called regularity that was first used by Raz and Wigderson. We show that functions with small discrepancy are regular.
We also observe that a weaker notion, that we call weak-regularity, already implies hardness of elimination. Finally, we give a different proof, borrowing ideas from Viola, to show that Greater-Than is weakly regular.