The Power of Negative Reasoning

Authors Susanna F. de Rezende, Massimo Lauria, Jakob Nordström, Dmitry Sokolov



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Author Details

Susanna F. de Rezende
  • Institute of Mathematics of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic
Massimo Lauria
  • Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy
Jakob Nordström
  • University of Copenhagen, Denmark
  • Lund University, Sweden
Dmitry Sokolov
  • St. Petersburg State University, Russia
  • PDMI RAS, St. Petersburg, Russia

Acknowledgements

We thank Or Meir for fruitful discussions and the anonymous reviewers for comments on the presentation.

Cite As Get BibTex

Susanna F. de Rezende, Massimo Lauria, Jakob Nordström, and Dmitry Sokolov. The Power of Negative Reasoning. In 36th Computational Complexity Conference (CCC 2021). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 200, pp. 40:1-40:24, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2021) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.CCC.2021.40

Abstract

Semialgebraic proof systems have been studied extensively in proof complexity since the late 1990s to understand the power of Gröbner basis computations, linear and semidefinite programming hierarchies, and other methods. Such proof systems are defined alternately with only the original variables of the problem and with special formal variables for positive and negative literals, but there seems to have been no study how these different definitions affect the power of the proof systems. We show for Nullstellensatz, polynomial calculus, Sherali-Adams, and sums-of-squares that adding formal variables for negative literals makes the proof systems exponentially stronger, with respect to the number of terms in the proofs. These separations are witnessed by CNF formulas that are easy for resolution, which establishes that polynomial calculus, Sherali-Adams, and sums-of-squares cannot efficiently simulate resolution without having access to variables for negative literals.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Proof complexity
  • Computing methodologies → Representation of polynomials
Keywords
  • Proof complexity
  • Polynomial calculus
  • Nullstellensatz
  • Sums-of-squares
  • Sherali-Adams

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