Smoothed Complexity of 2-player Nash Equilibria

We prove that computing a Nash equilibrium of a two-player (n × n) game with payoffs in [-1, 1] is PPAD-hard (under randomized reductions) even in the smoothed analysis setting, smoothing with noise of constant magnitude. This gives a strong negative answer to conjectures of Spielman and Teng [ST06] and Cheng, Deng, and Teng [CDT09].

In contrast to prior work proving PPAD-hardness after smoothing by noise of magnitude 1/poly(n) [CDT09], our smoothed complexity result is not proved via hardness of approximation for Nash equilibria. This is by necessity, since Nash equilibria can be approximated to constant error in quasi-polynomial time [LMM03]. Our results therefore separate smoothed complexity and hardness of approximation for Nash equilibria in two-player games.

The key ingredient in our reduction is the use of a random zero-sum game as a gadget to produce two-player games which remain hard even after smoothing. Our analysis crucially shows that all Nash equilibria of random zero-sum games are far from pure (with high probability), and that this remains true even after smoothing.