English

On Small-depth Frege Proofs for PHP

Computational Complexity 2026-01-14 v3

Abstract

We study Frege proofs for the one-to-one graph Pigeon Hole Principle defined on the n×nn\times n grid where nn is odd. We are interested in the case where each formula in the proof is a depth dd formula in the basis given by \land, \lor, and ¬\neg. We prove that in this situation the proof needs to be of size exponential in nΩ(1/d)n^{\Omega (1/d)}. If we restrict the size of each line in the proof to be of size MM then the number of lines needed is exponential in n/(logM)O(d)n/(\log M)^{O(d)}. The main technical component of the proofs is to design a new family of random restrictions and to prove the appropriate switching lemmas.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2401.15683,
  title  = {On Small-depth Frege Proofs for PHP},
  author = {Johan Håstad},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.15683},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

42 pages. This is the TheoretiCS journal version

R2 v1 2026-06-28T14:29:24.863Z