Local Restrictions from the Furst-Saxe-Sipser Paper

Abstract

In their celebrated paper (Furst et al., Math. Syst. Theory 17(1), 13---27 (12)), Furst, Saxe, and Sipser used random restrictions to reveal the weakness of Boolean circuits of bounded depth, establishing that constant-depth and polynomial-size circuits cannot compute the parity function. Such local restrictions have played important roles and have found many applications in complexity analysis and algorithm design over the past three decades. In this article, we give a brief overview of two intriguing applications of local restrictions: the first one is for the Isomorphism Conjecture and the second one is for moderately exponential time algorithms for the Boolean formula satisfiability problem.