Comparison communication protocols

Abstract

We introduce a restriction of the classical 2-party deterministic communication protocol where Alice and Bob are restricted to using only comparison functions. We show that the complexity of a function in the model is, up to a constant factor, determined by a complexity measure analogous to Yao's tiling number, which we call the geometric tiling number which can be computed in polynomial time. As a warm-up, we consider an analogous restricted decision tree model and observe a 1-dimensional analog of the above results.