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 grid where is odd. We are interested in the case where each formula in the proof is a depth formula in the basis given by , , and . We prove that in this situation the proof needs to be of size exponential in . If we restrict the size of each line in the proof to be of size then the number of lines needed is exponential in . 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