Butterflies on the Stretched Horizon

Abstract

In this paper I return to the question of what kind of perturbations on Alice's side of an Einstein-Rosen bridge can send messages to Bob as he enters the horizon at the other end. By definition "easy" operators do not activate messages and "hard" operators do, but there are no clear criteria to identify the difference between easy and hard. In this paper I argue that the difference is related to the time evolution of a certain measure of computational complexity, associated with the stretched horizon of Alice's black hole. The arguments suggest that the AMPSS commutator argument is more connected with butterflies than with firewalls.