Signal Propagation, with Application to a Lower Bound on the Depth of Noisy Formulas

We study the decay of an information signal propagating through a series of noisy channels. We obtain exact bounds on such decay, and as a result provide a new lower bound on the depth of formulas with noisy components. This improves upon previous work of Pippenger and significantly decreases the gap between his lower bound and the classical upper bound of von Neumann. We also discuss connections between our work and the study of mixing rates of Markov chains.