Paper list for PCP seminar II

Bogdanov's note on the limits of gap amplification in Dinur's proof; and Jutla's alternate implementation of one of Dinur's steps. (If we used Charanjit's argument in the lecture than this option might not be available.)
Raz' counter-example to a strong version of the parallel repetition (PR) theorem
Fiege, Kindler, and O'Donnell.'s work on the connection between PR and foam
Anup Rao's first paper on PR
Venkatesan Guruswami, Daniel Lewin, Madhu Sudan, and Luca Trevisan. A tight characterization of NP with 3-query PCPs. FOCS 1998. ($NP = PCP[O(log n), 3]$ with perfect completeness and soundness $1/2+\epsilon$, for any $\epsilon$)
Lectures 11 (section 2 onwards) and 12 and 13 from Venkat and Ryan's course. (Two/three students can present these in sequel.)
Ben-Sasson and Sudan, Short PCPs with polylog query complexity

Uriel Feige, A Threshold of ln n for Approximating Set Cover (JACM 1998, STOC 1996)
Johan Hastad's classic work Some optimal inapproximability results, (STOC 97, JACM 2001)

Howard J. Karloff, Uri Zwick: A 7/8-Approximation Algorithm for MAX 3SAT? FOCS 1997: 406-415. ($P = PCP[O(log n), 3]$ with completeness $1$ and soundness $1/2$)
J. Håstad, Clique is Hard to Approximate within n to the power 1-epsilon, Acta Mathematica, Vol 182, 1999, pp 105-142. (Another classic paper; uses amortized free bit complexity; should be presented)
Irit Dinur, Shmuel Safra: The importance of being biased. STOC 2002: 33-42 (Best NP-hardness of approximating Vertex Cover, 1.36, some one must present this paper, please!)
Uriel Feige, Joe Kilian: Zero Knowledge and the Chromatic Number. J. Comput. Syst. Sci. 57(2): 187-199 (1998). Also, CCC 96. (Best NP-hardness of approximating Chormatic number.)
Hardness of approximating the min distance of linear codes

Dumer, Micciancio, Sudan, Hardness of approximating the minimum distance of linear codes, FOCS 1999, also IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 49(1):22-37 (Jan. 2003).

Cheng and Wan, A Deterministic Reduction for the Gap Minimum Distance Problem, STOC 2009 (Hardness of approximating the distance of a linear code - the result is better than the Dumer-Micciancio-Sudan result, so it is better to present this paper)

Venkatesan Guruswami, Prasad Raghavendra, Hardness of Solving Sparse Overdetermined Linear Systems: A 3-Query PCP over Integers, ECCC TR09-020. (A generalization of Hastad's 3-bit PCP.)
Chuzhoy et al, On the approximability of some network design problems, SODA 2007
R. O'Donnell, Y. Wu, Conditional hardness for satisfiable 3-CSPs, STOC 2009
Guruswami et al, Hardness of learning half-spaces with noise, FOCS 2006
Matthew Andrews, Lisa Zhang: Logarithmic hardness of the undirected edge-disjoint paths problem. J. ACM 53(5): 745-761 (2006)
Matthew Andrews, Julia Chuzhoy, Sanjeev Khanna, Lisa Zhang: Hardness of the Undirected Edge-Disjoint Paths Problem with Congestion. FOCS 2005: 226-244