How Limited Interaction Hinders Real Communication (and What It Means for Proof and Circuit Complexity)

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingArticle in proceedingsResearchpeer-review

  • Susanna F. De Rezende
  • Jakob Nordstrom
  • Marc Vinyals

We obtain the first true size-space trade-offs for the cutting planes proof system, where the upper bounds hold for size and total space for derivations with constantsize coefficients, and the lower bounds apply to length and formula space (i.e., number of inequalities in memory) even for derivations with exponentially large coefficients. These are also the first trade-offs to hold uniformly for resolution, polynomial calculus and cutting planes, thus capturing the main methods of reasoning used in current state-of-the-art SAT solvers. We prove our results by a reduction to communication lower bounds in a round-efficient version of the real communication model of [Krajǐcek '98], drawing on and extending techniques in [Raz and McKenzie '99] and [Ġoos et al. '15]. The communication lower bounds are in turn established by a reduction to trade-offs between cost and number of rounds in the game of [Dymond and Tompa '85] played on directed acyclic graphs. As a by-product of the techniques developed to show these proof complexity trade-off results, we also obtain an exponential separation between monotone-ACi1 and monotone-ACi, improving exponentially over the superpolynomial separation in [Raz and McKenzie '99]. That is, we give an explicit Boolean function that can be computed by monotone Boolean circuits of depth logi n and polynomial size, but for which circuits of depth O(logi1 n) require exponential size.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 57th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, FOCS 2016
Number of pages10
PublisherIEEE Computer Society Press
Publication date14 Dec 2016
Pages295-304
Article number7782943
ISBN (Electronic)9781509039333
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 14 Dec 2016
Externally publishedYes
Event57th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, FOCS 2016 - New Brunswick, United States
Duration: 9 Oct 201611 Oct 2016

Conference

Conference57th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, FOCS 2016
LandUnited States
ByNew Brunswick
Periode09/10/201611/10/2016
SponsorIEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Mathematical Foundations of Computing
SeriesProceedings - Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, FOCS
Volume2016-December
ISSN0272-5428

    Research areas

  • Circuit complexity, Communication complexity, Cutting planes, Pebble games, Proof complexity, Trade-offs

ID: 251868455