Exponential Resolution Lower Bounds for Weak Pigeonhole Principle and Perfect Matching Formulas over Sparse Graphs

Authors Susanna F. de Rezende , Jakob Nordström , Kilian Risse , Dmitry Sokolov



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Author Details

Susanna F. de Rezende
  • Institute of Mathematics of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic
Jakob Nordström
  • University of Copenhagen, Denmark
  • Lund University, Sweden
Kilian Risse
  • KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
Dmitry Sokolov
  • St. Petersburg State University, Russia
  • St. Petersburg Department of Steklov Mathematical Institute of Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, we are most grateful to Alexander Razborov for many discussions about pseudo-width, graph closure, and other mysteries of the universe. We also thank Paul Beame and Johan Håstad for useful discussions, and Jonah Brown-Cohen for helpful references on expander graphs. Finally, we gratefully acknowledge the feedback from participants of the Dagstuhl workshop 19121 Computational Complexity of Discrete Problems in March 2019.

Cite AsGet BibTex

Susanna F. de Rezende, Jakob Nordström, Kilian Risse, and Dmitry Sokolov. Exponential Resolution Lower Bounds for Weak Pigeonhole Principle and Perfect Matching Formulas over Sparse Graphs. In 35th Computational Complexity Conference (CCC 2020). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 169, pp. 28:1-28:24, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2020)
https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.CCC.2020.28

Abstract

We show exponential lower bounds on resolution proof length for pigeonhole principle (PHP) formulas and perfect matching formulas over highly unbalanced, sparse expander graphs, thus answering the challenge to establish strong lower bounds in the regime between balanced constant-degree expanders as in [Ben-Sasson and Wigderson '01] and highly unbalanced, dense graphs as in [Raz '04] and [Razborov '03, '04]. We obtain our results by revisiting Razborov’s pseudo-width method for PHP formulas over dense graphs and extending it to sparse graphs. This further demonstrates the power of the pseudo-width method, and we believe it could potentially be useful for attacking also other longstanding open problems for resolution and other proof systems.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Proof complexity
Keywords
  • proof complexity
  • resolution
  • weak pigeonhole principle
  • perfect matching
  • sparse graphs

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