We prove two new results about the randomized query complexity of composed functions. First, we show that the randomized composition conjecture is false: there are families of partial Boolean functions $f$ and $g$ such that $R(fcirc g)ll R(f) R(g)$. In fact, we show that the left hand side can be polynomially smaller than the right hand side (though in our construction, both sides are polylogarithmic in the input size of $f$). Second, we show that for all $f$ and $g$, $R(fcirc g)=Omega(mathop{noisyR}(f)cdot R(g))$, where $mathop{noisyR}(f)$ is a measure describing the cost of computing $f$ on noisy oracle inputs. We show that this composition theorem is the strongest possible of its type: for any measure $M(cdot)$ satisfying $R(fcirc g)=Omega(M(f)R(g))$ for all $f$ and $g$, it must hold that $mathop{noisyR}(f)=Omega(M(f))$ for all $f$. We also give a clean characterization of the measure $mathop{noisyR}(f)$: it satisfies $mathop{noisyR}(f)=Theta(R(fcirc gapmaj_n)/R(gapmaj_n))$, where $n$ is the input size of $f$ and $gapmaj_n$ is the $sqrt{n}$-gap majority function on $n$ bits.
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