1,610 research outputs found
Subclasses of Presburger Arithmetic and the Weak EXP Hierarchy
It is shown that for any fixed , the -fragment of
Presburger arithmetic, i.e., its restriction to quantifier alternations
beginning with an existential quantifier, is complete for
, the -th level of the weak EXP
hierarchy, an analogue to the polynomial-time hierarchy residing between
and . This result completes the
computational complexity landscape for Presburger arithmetic, a line of
research which dates back to the seminal work by Fischer & Rabin in 1974.
Moreover, we apply some of the techniques developed in the proof of the lower
bound in order to establish bounds on sets of naturals definable in the
-fragment of Presburger arithmetic: given a -formula
, it is shown that the set of non-negative solutions is an ultimately
periodic set whose period is at most doubly-exponential and that this bound is
tight.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figure
Finitisation in Bounded Arithmetic
I prove various results concerning un-decidability in weak fragments of Arithmetic. All results are concerned with S^{1}_{2} \subseteq T^{1}_{2} \subseteq S^{2}_{2} \subseteq T^{2}_{2} \subseteq.... a hierarchy of theories which have already been intensively studied in the literature. Ideally one would like to separate these systems. However this is generally expected to be a very deep problem, closely related to some of the most famous and open problems in complexity theory. In order to throw some light on the separation problems, I consider the case where the underlying language is enriched by extra relation and function symbols. The paper introduces a new type of results. These state that the first three levels in the hierarchy (i.e. S^{1}_{2}, T^{1}_{2} and S^{2}_{2}) are never able to distinguish (in a precise sense) the "finite'' from the "infinite''. The fourth level (i.e. T^{2}_{2}) in some cases can make such a distinction. More precisely, elementary principles from finitistical combinatorics (when expressed solely by the extra relation and function symbols) are only provable on the first three levels if they are valid when considered as principles of general (infinitistical) combinatorics. I show that this does not hold for the fourth level. All results are proved by forcing
Short Proofs for Slow Consistency
Let denote the finite
consistency statement "there are no proofs of contradiction in with
symbols". For a large class of natural theories , Pudl\'ak
has shown that the lengths of the shortest proofs of
in the theory
itself are bounded by a polynomial in . At the same time he conjectures that
does not have polynomial proofs of the finite consistency
statements . In contrast we show that Peano arithmetic
() has polynomial proofs of
,
where is the slow consistency statement for
Peano arithmetic, introduced by S.-D. Friedman, Rathjen and Weiermann. We also
obtain a new proof of the result that the usual consistency statement
is equivalent to iterations
of slow consistency. Our argument is proof-theoretic, while previous
investigations of slow consistency relied on non-standard models of arithmetic
Consistency of circuit lower bounds with bounded theories
Proving that there are problems in that require
boolean circuits of super-linear size is a major frontier in complexity theory.
While such lower bounds are known for larger complexity classes, existing
results only show that the corresponding problems are hard on infinitely many
input lengths. For instance, proving almost-everywhere circuit lower bounds is
open even for problems in . Giving the notorious difficulty of
proving lower bounds that hold for all large input lengths, we ask the
following question: Can we show that a large set of techniques cannot prove
that is easy infinitely often? Motivated by this and related
questions about the interaction between mathematical proofs and computations,
we investigate circuit complexity from the perspective of logic.
Among other results, we prove that for any parameter it is
consistent with theory that computational class , where is one of
the pairs: and , and , and
. In other words, these theories cannot establish
infinitely often circuit upper bounds for the corresponding problems. This is
of interest because the weaker theory already formalizes
sophisticated arguments, such as a proof of the PCP Theorem. These consistency
statements are unconditional and improve on earlier theorems of [KO17] and
[BM18] on the consistency of lower bounds with
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