Related papers: $P \ne NP$, propositional proof complexity, and re…
The infinite pigeonhole principle for 2-partitions ($\mathsf{RT}^1_2$) asserts the existence, for every set $A$, of an infinite subset of $A$ or of its complement. In this paper, we study the infinite pigeonhole principle from a…
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…
It is well known that Sparse PCA (Sparse Principal Component Analysis) is NP-hard to solve exactly on worst-case instances. What is the complexity of solving Sparse PCA approximately? Our contributions include: 1) a simple and efficient…
Does every Boolean tautology have a short propositional-calculus proof? Here, a propositional calculus (i.e. Frege) proof is a proof starting from a set of axioms and deriving new Boolean formulas using a set of fixed sound derivation…
The input to the NP-hard Point Line Cover problem (PLC) consists of a set $P$ of $n$ points on the plane and a positive integer $k$, and the question is whether there exists a set of at most $k$ lines which pass through all points in $P$. A…
We study the hardness of approximation of clause minimum and literal minimum representations of pure Horn functions in $n$ Boolean variables. We show that unless P=NP, it is not possible to approximate in polynomial time the minimum number…
In this paper, we investigate the total coefficient size of Nullstellensatz proofs. We show that Nullstellensatz proofs of the pigeonhole principle on $n$ pigeons require total coefficient size $2^{\Omega(n)}$ and that there exist…
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…
A propositional proof system $P$ has the strong feasible disjunction property iff there is a constant $c \geq 1$ such that whenever $P$ admits a size $s$ proof of $\bigvee_i \alpha_i$ with no two $\alpha_i$ sharing an atom then one of…
We show that for any given norm ball or proper cone, weak membership in its dual ball or dual cone is polynomial-time reducible to weak membership in the given ball or cone. A consequence is that the weak membership or membership problem…
We show that the TFNP problem RAMSEY is not black-box reducible to PIGEON, refuting a conjecture of Goldberg and Papadimitriou in the black-box setting. We prove this by giving reductions to RAMSEY from a new family of TFNP problems that…
Proofs in propositional logic are typically presented as trees of derived formulas or, alternatively, as directed acyclic graphs of derived formulas. This distinction between tree-like vs. dag-like structure is particularly relevant when…
We implement a variant of the quantum pigeonhole paradox thought experiment to study whether classical counting principles survive in the quantum domain. We observe strong measurements significantly violate the pigeonhole principle (that…
We investigate the size complexity of proofs in $Res(s)$ -- an extension of Resolution working on $s$-DNFs instead of clauses -- for families of contradictions given in the {\em unusual binary} encoding. A motivation of our work is size…
We study the *refuter* problems for proof complexity lower bounds. Suppose $\varphi$ is a hard tautology that does not admit any length-$s$ proof in some proof system $P$. In the corresponding refuter problem, we are given (query access to)…
We show that there exist properties that are maximally hard for testing, while still admitting PCPPs with a proof size very close to linear. Specifically, for every fixed $\ell$, we construct a property…
Most state-of-the-art satisfiability algorithms today are variants of the DPLL procedure augmented with clause learning. The main bottleneck for such algorithms, other than the obvious one of time, is the amount of memory used. In the field…
The concept of nearest integer is used to derive theorems and algorithms for the best approximations of an irrational by rational numbers, which are improved with the pigeonhole principle and used to offer an informed presentation of the…
We consider the proof complexity of the minimal complete fragment, KS, of standard deep inference systems for propositional logic. To examine the size of proofs we employ atomic flows, diagrams that trace structural changes through a proof…
We study possible formulations of algebraic propositional proof systems operating with noncommutative formulas. We observe that a simple formulation gives rise to systems at least as strong as Frege---yielding a semantic way to define a…