Abstract
We show that any nondeterministic read-once branching program that decides a satisfiable Tseitin formula based on an n × n grid graph has size at least 2Ω(n). Then using the Excluded Grid Theorem by Robertson and Seymour we show that for an arbitrary graph G(V, E) any nondeterministic read-once branching program that computes a satisfiable Tseitin formula based on G has size at least \(2^{\Omega (\text {tw}(G)^{\delta })}\) for all δ < 1/36, where tw(G) is the treewidth of G (for planar graphs and some other classes of graphs the statement holds for δ = 1). We apply the mentioned results to the analysis of the complexity of derivations in the proof system OBDD(∧,reordering) and show that any OBDD(∧,reordering)-refutation of an unsatisfiable Tseitin formula based on a graph G has size at least \(2^{\Omega (\text {tw}(G)^{\delta })}\). We also show an upper bound O(|E|2pw(G)) on the size of OBDD representations of a satisfiable Tseitin formula based on G and an upper bound \(O(|E||V| 2^{\text {pw}(G)}+|\text {TS}_{G,c}|^{2})\) on the size of OBDD(∧)-refutation of an unsatisifable Tseitin formula TSG, c, where pw(G) is the pathwidth of G.
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Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to Fedor Fomin and Alexander Kulikov for fruitful discussions and to Alexander Knop, Dmitry Sokolov and anonymous reviewers for useful comments. The second author is a Young Russian Mathematics award winner and would like to thank sponsors and jury of the contest.
The research was supported by Russian Science Foundation (project 16-11-10123). All research was done while the first author was working at St. Petersburg Department of V.A. Steklov Institute of Mathematics.
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Glinskih, L., Itsykson, D. On Tseitin Formulas, Read-Once Branching Programs and Treewidth. Theory Comput Syst 65, 613–633 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00224-020-10007-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00224-020-10007-8