We aim at investigating the solvability/insolvability of nondeterministic
logarithmic-space (NL) decision, search, and optimization problems
parameterized by size parameters using simultaneously polynomial time and
sub-linear space on multi-tape deterministic Turing machines. We are
particularly focused on a special NL-complete problem, 2SAT---the 2CNF Boolean
formula satisfiability problem---parameterized by the number of Boolean
variables. It is shown that 2SAT with n variables and m clauses can be
solved simultaneously polynomial time and (n/2clognβ)polylog(m+n) space for an absolute constant c>0. This fact inspires us to
propose a new, practical working hypothesis, called the linear space hypothesis
(LSH), which states that 2SAT3β---a restricted variant of 2SAT in which each
variable of a given 2CNF formula appears at most 3 times in the form of
literals---cannot be solved simultaneously in polynomial time using strictly
"sub-linear" (i.e., m(x)Ξ΅polylog(β£xβ£) for a certain constant
Ξ΅β(0,1)) space on all instances x. An immediate consequence of
this working hypothesis is Lξ =NL. Moreover, we use our
hypothesis as a plausible basis to lead to the insolvability of various NL
search problems as well as the nonapproximability of NL optimization problems.
For our investigation, since standard logarithmic-space reductions may no
longer preserve polynomial-time sub-linear-space complexity, we need to
introduce a new, practical notion of "short reduction." It turns out that,
parameterized with the number of variables, 2SAT3ββ is
complete for a syntactically restricted version of NL, called Syntactic
NLΟβ, under such short reductions. This fact supports the legitimacy
of our working hypothesis.Comment: (A4, 10pt, 25 pages) This current article extends and corrects its
preliminary report in the Proc. of the 42nd International Symposium on
Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (MFCS 2017), August 21-25, 2017,
Aalborg, Denmark, Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs),
Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik 2017, vol. 83, pp.
62:1-62:14, 201