Distribution Controlling Lemma



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Distribution Controlling Lemma

Distributions that are p-time computable can be dominated (with respect to p-time computable functions) by uniform distributions, which is an important property for proving completeness results. Levin [Lev86] first proved this property using a ``perfect rounding" technique that is interesting in its own right (see [Gur91a] for an exposition). Gurevich [Gur91a] provided a different and easier proof, and based on that Wang and Belanger [WB95] showed that if the distribution is not too small, it will also dominate the same uniform distribution within a constant factor.

 

Proof Sketch. be the linear presentable distribution that bounds , as guaranteed by Lemma 3.2. Let be the shortest binary string such that . Then . Now let be the position of the leftmost digit that is 1 in the binary fraction produced by a p-time algorithm that computes on input . Then . Let , where .


Jie Wang
Tue Feb 4 13:48:58 EST 1997