  In this paper we study the two player randomized communication complexity of
the sparse set disjointness and the exists-equal problems and give matching
lower and upper bounds (up to constant factors) for any number of rounds for
both of these problems. In the sparse set disjointness problem, each player
receives a k-subset of [m] and the goal is to determine whether the sets
intersect. For this problem, we give a protocol that communicates a total of
O(k\log^{(r)}k) bits over r rounds and errs with very small probability. Here
we can take r=\log^{*}k to obtain a O(k) total communication \log^{*}k-round
protocol with exponentially small error probability, improving on the O(k)-bits
O(\log k)-round constant error probability protocol of Hastad and Wigderson
from 1997.
  In the exist-equal problem, the players receive vectors x,y\in [t]^n and the
goal is to determine whether there exists a coordinate i such that x_i=y_i.
Namely, the exists-equal problem is the OR of n equality problems. Observe that
exists-equal is an instance of sparse set disjointness with k=n, hence the
protocol above applies here as well, giving an O(n\log^{(r)}n) upper bound. Our
main technical contribution in this paper is a matching lower bound: we show
that when t=\Omega(n), any r-round randomized protocol for the exists-equal
problem with error probability at most 1/3 should have a message of size
\Omega(n\log^{(r)}n). Our lower bound holds even for super-constant r <=
\log^*n, showing that any O(n) bits exists-equal protocol should have \log^*n -
O(1) rounds.
