Informally speaking, Impagliazzo’s hardcore lemma says that if a boolean function is “hard to compute on average” by small circuits, then there exists a set of inputs on which the same function is “extremely hard to compute on average” by slightly smaller circuits.
In this post, I am going to explain how I understand the proof of the hardcore lemma presented in the Arora-Barak complexity book (here). Because the formal proof can be found in the book I intend to write in an informal way. I think some subtleties are involved in turning the context of the lemma into a suitable two-player zero-sum game. Doing so enables one to use von Neumann’s minimax theorem to effectively “exchange the quantifiers” in the contrapositive statement of the lemma. Although the Arora-Barak proof mentions these subtleties, I am going to explore these in more detail and in a more accessible way for a beginner like me.
Saad Quader 