Tight Low Degree Hardness for Optimizing Pure Spherical Spin Glasses

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Mark Sellke

Published: 2025, Last Modified: 24 Mar 2026CoRR 2025EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: We prove constant degree polynomial algorithms cannot optimize pure spherical $p$-spin Hamiltonians beyond the algorithmic threshold $\mathsf{ALG}(p)=2\sqrt{\frac{p-1}{p}}$. The proof goes by transforming any hypothetical such algorithm into a Lipschitz one, for which hardness was shown previously by the author and B. Huang.