Related papers: Explicit Proofs and The Flip
We propose an algorithm which for any recursive group $G$, given by its effectively enumerable generators and recursively enumerable relations, outputs an explicit embedding of $G$ into a finitely presented group directly written by its…
Knowing the truth is rarely enough -- we also seek out reasons why the fact is true. While much is known about how we explain contingent truths, we understand less about how we explain facts, such as those in mathematics, that are true as a…
How hard is it to invert NP-problems? We show that all superlinearly certified inverses of NP problems are coNP-hard. To do so, we develop a novel proof technique that builds diagonalizations against certificates directly into a circuit.
We study a well-known technique of using absoluteness for giving choice-free proofs to some statements which are known to be provable with the axiom of choice. The idea is to reduce the problem to an inner model where the axiom of choice…
The Ideal Proof System (IPS) of Grochow & Pitassi (FOCS 2014, J. ACM, 2018) is an algebraic proof system that uses algebraic circuits to refute the solvability of unsatisfiable systems of polynomial equations. One potential drawback of IPS…
Motivated by the problem of finding finite versions of classical incompleteness theorems, we present some conjectures that go beyond ${\bf NP\neq co NP}$. These conjectures formally connect computational complexity with the difficulty of…
The geometry automated theorem proving area distinguishes itself by a large number of specific methods and implementations, different approaches (synthetic, algebraic, semi-synthetic) and different goals and applications (from research in…
This paper presents the following results on sets that are complete for NP. 1. If there is a problem in NP that requires exponential time at almost all lengths, then every many-one NP-complete set is complete under length-increasing…
This paper presents a type theory with a form of equality reflection: provable equalities can be used to coerce the type of a term. Coercions and other annotations, including implicit arguments, are dropped during reduction of terms. We…
"Clarithmetic" is a generic name for formal number theories similar to Peano arithmetic, but based on computability logic (see http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~giorgi/cl.html) instead of the more traditional classical or intuitionistic logics.…
Motivated by the recent experimental demonstrations of quantum supremacy, proving the hardness of the output of random quantum circuits is an imperative near term goal. We prove under the complexity theoretical assumption of the…
We observe that a certain kind of algebraic proof - which covers essentially all known algebraic circuit lower bounds to date - cannot be used to prove lower bounds against VP if and only if what we call succinct hitting sets exist for VP.…
Correspondence homomorphisms are both a generalization of standard homomorphisms and a generalization of correspondence colourings. For a fixed target graph $H$, the problem is to decide whether an input graph $G$, with each edge labeled by…
The motivation for this paper comes out of our experience with teaching natural deduction (ND) and with the way this formal system is implemented by the \textsc{Coq} proof assistant, namely by means of so-called tactics, which are…
This is a survey on propositional proof complexity aimed at introducing the basics of the field with a particular focus on a method known as feasible interpolation. This method is used to construct "hard theorems" for several proof systems…
Hardness magnification reduces major complexity separations (such as $\mathsf{\mathsf{EXP}} \nsubseteq \mathsf{NC}^1$) to proving lower bounds for some natural problem $Q$ against weak circuit models. Several recent works [OS18, MMW19,…
Rice's Theorem states that every nontrivial language property of the recursively enumerable sets is undecidable. Borchert and Stephan initiated the search for complexity-theoretic analogs of Rice's Theorem. In particular, they proved that…
This chapter is interested in the epistemology of algorithms. As I intend to approach the topic, this is an issue about epistemic justification. Current approaches to justification emphasize the transparency of algorithms, which entails…
The following two decision problems capture the complexity of comparing integers or rationals that are succinctly represented in product-of-exponentials notation, or equivalently, via arithmetic circuits using only multiplication and…
We show that it is coNP-complete to decide whether a given proof structure of pomset logic is a correct proof net, using the graph-theoretic used in a previous paper of ours (arXiv:1901.10247).