The value of information-theoretic content of help bits for computation

Abstract

“Help bits” are some limited trusted information about an instance or instances of a computational problem that may reduce the computational complexity of solving that instance or instances. Assume that we can efficiently solve k instances of a decision problem using some help bits whose entropy is less than k when the k instances are drawn independently from a particular distribution. Then there is an upper bound on the average-case complexity of the problem, namely we can efficiently solve an instance drawn from that distribution correctly with probability better than 1/2.