English

Lower Bounds for RAMs and Quantifier Elimination

Computational Complexity 2013-06-04 v1

Abstract

We are considering RAMs NnN_{n}, with wordlength n=2dn=2^{d}, whose arithmetic instructions are the arithmetic operations multiplication and addition modulo 2n2^{n}, the unary function min{2x,2n1} \min\lbrace 2^{x}, 2^{n}-1\rbrace, the binary functions x/y\lfloor x/y\rfloor (with x/0=0\lfloor x/0 \rfloor =0), max(x,y)\max(x,y), min(x,y)\min(x,y), and the boolean vector operations ,,¬\wedge,\vee,\neg defined on 0,10,1 sequences of length nn. It also has the other RAM instructions. The size of the memory is restricted only by the address space, that is, it is 2n2^{n} words. The RAMs has a finite instruction set, each instruction is encoded by a fixed natural number independently of nn. Therefore a program PP can run on each machine NnN_{n}, if n=2dn=2^{d} is sufficiently large. We show that there exists an ϵ>0\epsilon>0 and a program PP, such that it satisfies the following two conditions. (i) For all sufficiently large n=2dn=2^{d}, if PP running on NnN_{n} gets an input consisting of two words aa and bb, then, in constant time, it gives a 0,10,1 output Pn(a,b)P_{n}(a,b). (ii) Suppose that QQ is a program such that for each sufficiently large n=2dn=2^{d}, if QQ, running on NnN_{n}, gets a word aa of length nn as an input, then it decides whether there exists a word bb of length nn such that Pn(a,b)=0P_{n}(a,b)=0. Then, for infinitely many positive integers dd, there exists a word aa of length n=2dn=2^{d}, such that the running time of QQ on NnN_{n} at input aa is at least ϵ(logd)12(loglogd)1\epsilon (\log d)^{\frac{1}{2}} (\log \log d)^{-1}.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1306.0153,
  title  = {Lower Bounds for RAMs and Quantifier Elimination},
  author = {Miklos Ajtai},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1306.0153},
  year   = {2013}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T00:26:27.093Z