On the Capacity of Memoryless Adversary

Abstract: In this paper, we study a model of communication under adversarial noise. In this model, the adversary makes online decisions on whether to corrupt a transmitted bit based on only the value of that bit. Like the usual binary symmetric channel of information theory or the fully adversarial channel of combinatorial coding theory, the adversary can, with high probability, introduce at most a given fraction of error. It is shown that, the capacity (maximum rate of reliable information transfer) of such memoryless adversary is strictly below that of the binary symmetric channel. We give new upper bound on the capacity of such channel -- the tightness of this upper bound remains an open question. The main component of our proof is the careful examination of error-correcting properties of a code with skewed distance distribution.