Abstract: A given Boolean function has its input distributed among many parties. The aim is to determine which parties to talk to and what information to exchange with each of them in order to evaluate the function while minimizing the total communication. It is shown that it is possible to obtain the Boolean answer deterministically with only a polynomial increase in communication with respect to the information lower bound given by the nondeterministic communication complexity of the function.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>