Deterministic vs non-deterministic graph property testing

A graph property (Formula present) is said to be testable if one can check whether a graph is close or far from satisfying (Formula present) using few random local inspections. Property (Formula present) is said to be non-deterministically testable if one can supply a “certificate” to the fact that a graph satisfies (Formula present) so that once the certificate is given its correctness can be tested. The notion of non-deterministic testing of graph properties was recently introduced by Lovász and Vesztergombi [9], who proved that (somewhat surprisingly) a graph property is testable if and only if it is non-deterministically testable. Their proof used graph limits, and so it did not supply any explicit bounds. They thus asked if one can obtain a proof of their result which will supply such bounds. We answer their question positively by proving their result using Szemerédi’s regularity lemma.

An interesting aspect of our proof is that it highlights the fact that the regularity lemma can be interpreted as saying that all graphs can be approximated by finitely many “template” graphs.