Checking computations in polylogarithmic time

Abstract

. Motivated by Manuel Blum's concept of instance checking, we consider new, very fast and generic mechanisms of checking computations. Our results exploit recent advances in interactive proof protocols [LFKN92], [Sha92], and especially the MIP = NEXP protocol from [BFL91]. We show that every nondeterministic computational task S(x; y), defined as a polynomial time relation between the instance x, representing the input and output combined, and the witness y can be modified to a task S 0 such that: (i) the same instances remain accepted; (ii) each instance/witness pair becomes checkable in polylogarithmic Monte Carlo time; and (iii) a witness satisfying S 0 can be computed in polynomial time from a witness satisfying S. Here the instance and the description of S have to be provided in error-correcting code (since the checker will not notice slight changes). A modification of the MIP proof was required to achieve polynomial time in (iii); the earlier technique yields N O(log log N)...