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A Super-Polynomial Separation Between Resolution and Cut-Free Sequent Calculus

Author Theodoros Papamakarios

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Theodoros Papamakarios
  • Department of Computer Science, University of Chicago, IL, USA

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Alexander Razborov for numerous suggestions and remarks that greatly improved the presentation of the paper.

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Theodoros Papamakarios. A Super-Polynomial Separation Between Resolution and Cut-Free Sequent Calculus. In 48th International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (MFCS 2023). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 272, pp. 74:1-74:15, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2023)
https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.MFCS.2023.74

Abstract

We show a quadratic separation between resolution and cut-free sequent calculus width. We use this gap to get, for the first time, first, a super-polynomial separation between resolution and cut-free sequent calculus for refuting CNF formulas, and secondly, a quadratic separation between resolution width and monomial space in polynomial calculus with resolution. Our super-polynomial separation between resolution and cut-free sequent calculus only applies when clauses are seen as disjunctions of unbounded arity; our examples have linear size cut-free sequent calculus proofs writing, in a particular way, their clauses using binary disjunctions. Interestingly, this shows that the complexity of sequent calculus depends on how disjunctions are represented.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Proof complexity
Keywords
  • Proof Complexity
  • Resolution
  • Cut-free LK

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