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Tree-width is a well-studied parameter of structures that measures their similarity to a tree. Many important NP-complete problems, such as Boolean satisfiability (SAT), are tractable on bounded tree-width instances. In this paper we focus on the canonical PSPACE-complete problem QBF, the fully-quantified version of SAT. It was shown by Pan and Vardi [LICS 2006] that this problem is PSPACE-complete even for formulas whose tree-width grows extremely slowly. Vardi also posed the question of whether the problem is tractable when restricted to instances of bounded tree-width. We answer this question by showing that QBF on instances with constant tree-width is PSPACE-complete.
@InProceedings{atserias_et_al:LIPIcs.STACS.2013.44,
author = {Atserias, Albert and Oliva, Sergi},
title = {{Bounded-width QBF is PSPACE-complete}},
booktitle = {30th International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science (STACS 2013)},
pages = {44--54},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-939897-50-7},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2013},
volume = {20},
editor = {Portier, Natacha and Wilke, Thomas},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.STACS.2013.44},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-39217},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.STACS.2013.44},
annote = {Keywords: Tree-width, QBF, PSPACE-complete}
}