The unbounded-error communication complexity of symmetric functions

We prove an essentially tight lower bound on the unbounded-error communication complexity of every symmetric function, i.e., f(x,y)=D(|x∧y|), where D: {0,1,…,n}→{0,1} is a given predicate and x,y range over {0,1} ⁿ . Specifically, we show that the communication complexity of f is between Θ(k/log⁵ n) and Θ(k logn), where k is the number of value changes of D in {0,1,…, n}. Prior to this work, the problem was solved only for the parity predicate D (Forster 2001).