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Improved Lower Bounds for Testing Triangle-freeness in Boolean Functions via Fast Matrix Multiplication

Understanding the query complexity for testing linear-invariant properties has been a central open problem in the study of algebraic property testing. Triangle-freeness in Boolean functions is a simple property whose testing complexity is unknown. Three Boolean functions $f_1$, $f_2$ and $f_3: \mathbb{F}_2^k \to \{0, 1\}$ are said to be triangle free if there is no $x, y \in \mathbb{F}_2^k$ such that $f_1(x) = f_2(y) = f_3(x + y) = 1$. This property is known to be strongly testable (Green 2005), but the number of queries needed is upper-bounded only by a tower of twos whose height is polynomial in $1 / \epsislon$, where $\epsislon$ is the distance between the tested function triple and triangle-freeness, i.e., the minimum fraction of function values that need to be modified to make the triple triangle free. A lower bound of $(1 / ε)^{2.423}$ for any one-sided tester was given by Bhattacharyya and Xie (2010). In this work we improve this bound to $(1 / ε)^{6.619}$. Interestingly, we prove this by way of a combinatorial construction called \emph{uniquely solvable puzzles} that was at the heart of Coppersmith and Winograd's renowned matrix multiplication algorithm.