TY - GEN

T1 - Towards an understanding of polynomial calculus

T2 - 40th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming, ICALP 2013

AU - Filmus, Yuval

AU - Lauria, Massimo

AU - Mikša, Mladen

AU - Nordström, Jakob

AU - Vinyals, Marc

PY - 2013

Y1 - 2013

N2 - During the last decade, an active line of research in proof complexity has been into the space complexity of proofs and how space is related to other measures. By now these aspects of resolution are fairly well understood, but many open problems remain for the related but stronger polynomial calculus (PC/PCR) proof system. For instance, the space complexity of many standard "benchmark formulas" is still open, as well as the relation of space to size and degree in PC/PCR. We prove that if a formula requires large resolution width, then making XOR substitution yields a formula requiring large PCR space, providing some circumstantial evidence that degree might be a lower bound for space. More importantly, this immediately yields formulas that are very hard for space but very easy for size, exhibiting a size-space separation similar to what is known for resolution. Using related ideas, we show that if a graph has good expansion and in addition its edge set can be partitioned into short cycles, then the Tseitin formula over this graph requires large PCR space. In particular, Tseitin formulas over random 4-regular graphs almost surely require space at least Ω(√n). Our proofs use techniques recently introduced in [Bonacina-Galesi '13]. Our final contribution, however, is to show that these techniques provably cannot yield non-constant space lower bounds for the functional pigeonhole principle, delineating the limitations of this framework and suggesting that we are still far from characterizing PC/PCR space.

AB - During the last decade, an active line of research in proof complexity has been into the space complexity of proofs and how space is related to other measures. By now these aspects of resolution are fairly well understood, but many open problems remain for the related but stronger polynomial calculus (PC/PCR) proof system. For instance, the space complexity of many standard "benchmark formulas" is still open, as well as the relation of space to size and degree in PC/PCR. We prove that if a formula requires large resolution width, then making XOR substitution yields a formula requiring large PCR space, providing some circumstantial evidence that degree might be a lower bound for space. More importantly, this immediately yields formulas that are very hard for space but very easy for size, exhibiting a size-space separation similar to what is known for resolution. Using related ideas, we show that if a graph has good expansion and in addition its edge set can be partitioned into short cycles, then the Tseitin formula over this graph requires large PCR space. In particular, Tseitin formulas over random 4-regular graphs almost surely require space at least Ω(√n). Our proofs use techniques recently introduced in [Bonacina-Galesi '13]. Our final contribution, however, is to show that these techniques provably cannot yield non-constant space lower bounds for the functional pigeonhole principle, delineating the limitations of this framework and suggesting that we are still far from characterizing PC/PCR space.

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84880288724&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1007/978-3-642-39206-1_37

DO - 10.1007/978-3-642-39206-1_37

M3 - Article in proceedings

AN - SCOPUS:84880288724

SN - 9783642392054

T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)

SP - 437

EP - 448

BT - Automata, Languages, and Programming - 40th International Colloquium, ICALP 2013, Proceedings

Y2 - 8 July 2013 through 12 July 2013

ER -