The tale of the PCP theorem

The PCP theorem [Arora and Safra 1998; Arora et. al. 1998] says that every language in NP has a witness format that can be checked probabilistically by reading only a constant number of bits from the proof. The celebrated equivalence of this theorem and ...

The current proof of the probabilistically checkable proofs (PCP) theorem (i.e., ${\cal NP}={\cal PCP}(\log,O(1))$) is very complicated. One source of difficulty is the technically involved analysis of low-degree tests. Here, we refer to the difficulty ...

The PCP theorem has recently been shown to hold as well in the real number model of Blum, Shub, and Smale (Baartse and Meer, 2015). The proof given there structurally closely follows the proof of the original PCP theorem by Dinur (2007). In this paper ...