No Arabic abstract
An aperiodic tile set was first constructed by R.Berger while proving the undecidability of the domino problem. It turned out that aperiodic tile sets appear in many topics ranging from logic (the Entscheidungsproblem) to physics (quasicrystals) We present a new construction of an aperiodic tile set that is based on Kleenes fixed-point construction instead of geometric arguments. This construction is similar to J. von Neumann self-reproducing automata; similar ideas were also used by P. Gacs in the context of error-correcting computations. The flexibility of this construction allows us to construct a robust aperiodic tile set that does not have periodic (or close to periodic) tilings even if we allow some (sparse enough) tiling errors. This property was not known for any of the existing aperiodic tile sets.
Jeandel and Rao proved that 11 is the size of the smallest set of Wang tiles, i.e., unit squares with colored edges, that admit valid tilings (contiguous edges of adjacent tiles have the same color) of the plane, none of them being invariant under a nontrivial translation. We study herein the Wang shift $Omega_0$ made of all valid tilings using the set $mathcal{T}_0$ of 11 aperiodic Wang tiles discovered by Jeandel and Rao. We show that there exists a minimal subshift $X_0$ of $Omega_0$ such that every tiling in $X_0$ can be decomposed uniquely into 19 distinct patches of sizes ranging from 45 to 112 that are equivalent to a set of 19 self-similar and aperiodic Wang tiles. We suggest that this provides an almost complete description of the substitutive structure of Jeandel-Rao tilings, as we believe that $Omega_0setminus X_0$ is a null set for any shift-invariant probability measure on $Omega_0$. The proof is based on 12 elementary steps, 10 of which involve the same procedure allowing one to desubstitute Wang tilings from the existence of a subset of marker tiles. The 2 other steps involve the addition of decorations to deal with fault lines and changing the base of the $mathbb{Z}^2$-action through a shear conjugacy. Algorithms are provided to find markers, recognizable substitutions, and shear conjugacy from a set of Wang tiles.
A combinatorial substitution is a map over tilings which allows to define sets of tilings with a strong hierarchical structure. In this paper, we show that such sets of tilings are sofic, that is, can be enforced by finitely many local constraints. This extends some similar previous results (Mozes90, Goodman-Strauss98) in a much shorter presentation.
Dempster-Shafer Theory (DST) generalizes Bayesian probability theory, offering useful additional information, but suffers from a high computational burden. A lot of work has been done to reduce the complexity of computations used in information fusion with Dempsters rule. The main approaches exploit either the structure of Boolean lattices or the information contained in belief sources. Each has its merits depending on the situation. In this paper, we propose sequences of graphs for the computation of the zeta and Mobius transformations that optimally exploit both the structure of distributive semilattices and the information contained in belief sources. We call them the Efficient Mobius Transformations (EMT). We show that the complexity of the EMT is always inferior to the complexity of algorithms that consider the whole lattice, such as the Fast Mobius Transform (FMT) for all DST transformations. We then explain how to use them to fuse two belief sources. More generally, our EMTs apply to any function in any finite distributive lattice, focusing on a meet-closed or join-closed subset. This article extends our work published at the international conference on Scalable Uncertainty Management (SUM). It clarifies it, brings some minor corrections and provides implementation details such as data structures and algorithms applied to DST.
We identify a new notion of pseudorandomness for randomness sources, which we call the average bias. Given a distribution $Z$ over ${0,1}^n$, its average bias is: $b_{text{av}}(Z) =2^{-n} sum_{c in {0,1}^n} |mathbb{E}_{z sim Z}(-1)^{langle c, zrangle}|$. A source with average bias at most $2^{-k}$ has min-entropy at least $k$, and so low average bias is a stronger condition than high min-entropy. We observe that the inner product function is an extractor for any source with average bias less than $2^{-n/2}$. The notion of average bias especially makes sense for polynomial sources, i.e., distributions sampled by low-degree $n$-variate polynomials over $mathbb{F}_2$. For the well-studied case of affine sources, it is easy to see that min-entropy $k$ is exactly equivalent to average bias of $2^{-k}$. We show that for quadratic sources, min-entropy $k$ implies that the average bias is at most $2^{-Omega(sqrt{k})}$. We use this relation to design dispersers for separable quadratic sources with a min-entropy guarantee.
In analogy with the regularity lemma of Szemeredi, regularity lemmas for polynomials shown by Green and Tao (Contrib. Discrete Math. 2009) and by Kaufman and Lovett (FOCS 2008) modify a given collection of polynomials calF = {P_1,...,P_m} to a new collection calF so that the polynomials in calF are pseudorandom. These lemmas have various applications, such as (special cases) of Reed-Muller testing and worst-case to average-case reductions for polynomials. However, the transformation from calF to calF is not algorithmic for either regularity lemma. We define new notions of regularity for polynomials, which are analogous to the above, but which allow for an efficient algorithm to compute the pseudorandom collection calF. In particular, when the field is of high characteristic, in polynomial time, we can refine calF into calF where every nonzero linear combination of polynomials in calF has desirably small Gowers norm. Using the algorithmic regularity lemmas, we show that if a polynomial P of degree d is within (normalized) Hamming distance 1-1/|F| -eps of some unknown polynomial of degree k over a prime field F (for k < d < |F|), then there is an efficient algorithm for finding a degree-k polynomial Q, which is within distance 1-1/|F| -eta of P, for some eta depending on eps. This can be thought of as decoding the Reed-Muller code of order k beyond the list decoding radius (finding one close codeword), when the received word P itself is a polynomial of degree d (with k < d < |F|). We also obtain an algorithmic version of the worst-case to average-case reductions by Kaufman and Lovett. They show that if a polynomial of degree d can be weakly approximated by a polynomial of lower degree, then it can be computed exactly using a collection of polynomials of degree at most d-1. We give an efficient (randomized) algorithm to find this collection.