On the complexity of trial and error

Abstract

Motivated by certain applications from physics, biochemistry, economics, and computer science in which the objects under investigation are unknown or not directly accessible because of various limitations, we propose a trial-and-error model to examine search problems in which inputs are unknown. More specifically, we consider constraint satisfaction problems ⋀i Ci, where the constraints Ci are hidden, and the goal is to find a solution satisfying all constraints. We can adaptively propose a candidate solution (i.e., trial), and there is a verification oracle that either confirms that it is a valid solution, or returns the index i of a violated constraint (i.e., error), with the exact content of Ci still hidden.