Average case lower bounds for monotone switching networks

An approximate computation of a Boolean function by a circuit or switching network is a computation in which the function is computed correctly on the majority of the inputs (rather than on all inputs). Besides being interesting in their own right, lower bounds for approximate computation have proved useful in many subareas of complexity theory, such as cryptography and derandomization. Lower bounds for approximate computation are also known as correlation bounds or average case hardness. In this paper, we obtain the first average case monotone depth lower bounds for a function in monotone P. We tolerate errors that are asymptotically the best possible for monotone circuits. Specifically, we prove average case exponential lower bounds on the size of monotone switching networks for the GEN function. As a corollary, we separate the monotone NC hierarchy in the case of errors - A result which was previously only known for exact computations. Our proof extends and simplifies the Fourier analytic technique due to Potechin [21], and further developed by Chan and Potechin [8]. As a corollary of our main lower bound, we prove that the communication complexity approach for monotone depth lower bounds does not naturally generalize to the average case setting.