Some improvements to total degree tests

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Abstract
A low-degree test is a collection of simple, local rules for checking the proximity of an arbitrary function to a low-degree polynomial. Each rule depends on the function's values at a small number of places. If a function satisfies many rules then it is close to a low-degree polynomial. Low-degree tests play an important role in the development of probabilistically checkable proofs. In this paper we present two improvements to the efficiency of low-degree tests. Our first improvement concerns the smallest field size over which a low-degree test can work. We show how to test that a function is a degree d polynomial over prime fields of size only d+2. Our second improvement shows a better efficiency of the low-degree test of Rubinfeld and Sudan (1993) than previously known. We show concrete applications of this improvement via the notion of "locally checkable codes". This improvement translates into better tradeoffs on the size versus probe complexity of probabilistically checkable proofs than previously known.

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