254 research outputs found
On the existence of complete disjoint NP-pairs
Disjoint NP-pairs are an interesting model of computation with important applications in cryptography and proof complexity. The question whether there exists a complete disjoint NP-pair was posed by Razborov in 1994 and is one of the most important problems in the field. In this paper we prove that there exists a many-one hard disjoint NP-pair which is computed with access to a very weak oracle (a tally NP-oracle). In addition, we exhibit candidates for complete NP-pairs and apply our results to a recent line of research on the construction of hard tautologies from pseudorandom generators
Nondeterministic functions and the existence of optimal proof systems
We provide new characterizations of two previously studied questions on nondeterministic function classes: Q1: Do nondeterministic functions admit efficient deterministic refinements? Q2: Do nondeterministic function classes contain complete functions? We show that Q1 for the class is equivalent to the question whether the standard proof system for SAT is p-optimal, and to the assumption that every optimal proof system is p-optimal. Assuming only the existence of a p-optimal proof system for SAT, we show that every set with an optimal proof system has a p-optimal proof system. Under the latter assumption, we also obtain a positive answer to Q2 for the class . An alternative view on nondeterministic functions is provided by disjoint sets and tuples. We pursue this approach for disjoint -pairs and its generalizations to tuples of sets from and with disjointness conditions of varying strength. In this way, we obtain new characterizations of Q2 for the class . Question Q1 for is equivalent to the question of whether every disjoint -pair is easy to separate. In addition, we characterize this problem by the question of whether every propositional proof system has the effective interpolation property. Again, these interpolation properties are intimately connected to disjoint -pairs, and we show how different interpolation properties can be modeled by -pairs associated with the underlying proof system
Nondeterministic Instance Complexity and Proof Systems with Advice
Motivated by strong Karp-Lipton collapse results in bounded arithmetic, Cook and Krajíček [1] have recently introduced the notion of propositional proof systems with advice. In this paper we investigate the following question: Given a language L , do there exist polynomially bounded proof systems with advice for L ? Depending on the complexity of the underlying language L and the amount and type of the advice used by the proof system, we obtain different characterizations for this problem. In particular, we show that the above question is tightly linked with the question whether L has small nondeterministic instance complexity
Different Approaches to Proof Systems
The classical approach to proof complexity perceives proof systems as deterministic, uniform, surjective, polynomial-time computable functions that map strings to (propositional) tautologies. This approach has been intensively studied since the late 70’s and a lot of progress has been made. During the last years research was started investigating alternative notions of proof systems. There are interesting results stemming from dropping the uniformity requirement, allowing oracle access, using quantum computations, or employing probabilism. These lead to different notions of proof systems for which we survey recent results in this paper
Alternation-Trading Proofs, Linear Programming, and Lower Bounds
A fertile area of recent research has demonstrated concrete polynomial time
lower bounds for solving natural hard problems on restricted computational
models. Among these problems are Satisfiability, Vertex Cover, Hamilton Path,
Mod6-SAT, Majority-of-Majority-SAT, and Tautologies, to name a few. The proofs
of these lower bounds follow a certain proof-by-contradiction strategy that we
call alternation-trading. An important open problem is to determine how
powerful such proofs can possibly be.
We propose a methodology for studying these proofs that makes them amenable
to both formal analysis and automated theorem proving. We prove that the search
for better lower bounds can often be turned into a problem of solving a large
series of linear programming instances. Implementing a small-scale theorem
prover based on this result, we extract new human-readable time lower bounds
for several problems. This framework can also be used to prove concrete
limitations on the current techniques.Comment: To appear in STACS 2010, 12 page
Average-Case Hardness of Proving Tautologies and Theorems
We consolidate two widely believed conjectures about tautologies -- no
optimal proof system exists, and most require superpolynomial size proofs in
any system -- into a -isomorphism-invariant condition satisfied by all
paddable -complete languages or none. The condition is: for any
Turing machine (TM) accepting the language, -uniform input
families requiring superpolynomial time by exist (equivalent to the first
conjecture) and appear with positive upper density in an enumeration of input
families (implies the second). In that case, no such language is easy on
average (in ) for a distribution applying non-negligible weight
to the hard families.
The hardness of proving tautologies and theorems is likely related. Motivated
by the fact that arithmetic sentences encoding "string is Kolmogorov
random" are true but unprovable with positive density in a finitely axiomatized
theory (Calude and J{\"u}rgensen), we conjecture that any
propositional proof system requires superpolynomial size proofs for a dense set
of -uniform families of tautologies encoding "there is no
proof of size showing that string is Kolmogorov
random". This implies the above condition.
The conjecture suggests that there is no optimal proof system because
undecidable theories help prove tautologies and do so more efficiently as
axioms are added, and that constructing hard tautologies seems difficult
because it is impossible to construct Kolmogorov random strings. Similar
conjectures that computational blind spots are manifestations of
noncomputability would resolve other open problems
NEXP-completeness and Universal Hardness Results for Justification Logic
We provide a lower complexity bound for the satisfiability problem of a
multi-agent justification logic, establishing that the general NEXP upper bound
from our previous work is tight. We then use a simple modification of the
corresponding reduction to prove that satisfiability for all multi-agent
justification logics from there is hard for the Sigma 2 p class of the second
level of the polynomial hierarchy - given certain reasonable conditions. Our
methods improve on these required conditions for the same lower bound for the
single-agent justification logics, proven by Buss and Kuznets in 2009, thus
answering one of their open questions.Comment: Shorter version has been accepted for publication by CSR 201
On slicewise monotone parameterized problems and optimal proof systems for TAUT
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