English

Pebbling Arguments for Tree Evaluation

Computational Complexity 2013-11-05 v1

Abstract

The Tree Evaluation Problem was introduced by Cook et al. in 2010 as a candidate for separating P from L and NL. The most general space lower bounds known for the Tree Evaluation Problem require a semantic restriction on the branching programs and use a connection to well-known pebble games to generate a bottleneck argument. These bounds are met by corresponding upper bounds generated by natural implementations of optimal pebbling algorithms. In this paper we extend these ideas to a variety of restricted families of both deterministic and non-deterministic branching programs, proving tight lower bounds under these restricted models. We also survey and unify known lower bounds in our "pebbling argument" framework.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1311.0293,
  title  = {Pebbling Arguments for Tree Evaluation},
  author = {David Liu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1311.0293},
  year   = {2013}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T01:59:26.029Z