Interactive proofs and the hardness of approximating cliques

The contribution of this paper is two-fold. First, a connection is established between approximating the size of the largest clique in a graph and multi-prover interactive proofs. Second, an efficient multi-prover interactive proof for NP languages is constructed, where the verifier uses very few random bits and communication bits. Last, the connection between cliques and efficient multi-prover interactive proofs, is shown to yield hardness results on the complexity of approximating the size of the largest clique in a graph. Of independent interest is our proof of correctness for the multilinearity test of functions.