On Time Versus Space III

Coordinated Science Laboratory was formerly known as Control Systems LaboratoryNational Science Foundation / MCS-8217445 and MCS-7719754Eastman Kodak CompanyFannie and John Hertz Foundatio

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

On parallel Turing machines with multi-head control units

This paper deals with parallel Turing machines with multi-head control units on one or more tapes which can be considered as a generalization of cellular automata. We discuss the problem of finding an appropriate measure of space complexity. A definition is suggested which implies that the model is in the first machine class. It is shown that without loss of generality it suffices to consider only parallel Turing machines of certain normal forms

Hierarchies and Space Measures for Pointer Machines

Coordinated Science Laboratory was formerly known as Control Systems LaboratoryAir Force Institute of Technology, AFIT/CIR