Filmus, Yuval
[Author];
Hirsch, Edward A.
[Author];
Riazanov, Artur
[Author];
Smal, Alexander
[Author];
Vinyals, Marc
[Author]
;
Yuval Filmus and Edward A. Hirsch and Artur Riazanov and Alexander Smal and Marc Vinyals
[Contributor]
Footnote:
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Description:
A hitting formula is a set of Boolean clauses such that any two of the clauses cannot be simultaneously falsified. Hitting formulas have been studied in many different contexts at least since [Iwama, 1989] and, based on experimental evidence, Peitl and Szeider [Tomás Peitl and Stefan Szeider, 2022] conjectured that unsatisfiable hitting formulas are among the hardest for resolution. Using the fact that hitting formulas are easy to check for satisfiability we make them the foundation of a new static proof system {{rmHitting}}: a refutation of a CNF in {{rmHitting}} is an unsatisfiable hitting formula such that each of its clauses is a weakening of a clause of the refuted CNF. Comparing this system to resolution and other proof systems is equivalent to studying the hardness of hitting formulas. Our first result is that {{rmHitting}} is quasi-polynomially simulated by tree-like resolution, which means that hitting formulas cannot be exponentially hard for resolution and partially refutes the conjecture of Peitl and Szeider. We show that tree-like resolution and {{rmHitting}} are quasi-polynomially separated, while for resolution, this question remains open. For a system that is only quasi-polynomially stronger than tree-like resolution, {{rmHitting}} is surprisingly difficult to polynomially simulate in another proof system. Using the ideas of Raz-Shpilka’s polynomial identity testing for noncommutative circuits [Raz and Shpilka, 2005] we show that {{rmHitting}} is p-simulated by {{rmExtended {{rmFrege}}}}, but we conjecture that much more efficient simulations exist. As a byproduct, we show that a number of static (semi)algebraic systems are verifiable in deterministic polynomial time. We consider multiple extensions of {{rmHitting}}, and in particular a proof system {{{rmHitting}}(⊕)} related to the {{{rmRes}}(⊕)} proof system for which no superpolynomial-size lower bounds are known. {{{rmHitting}}(⊕)} p-simulates the tree-like version of {{{rmRes}}(⊕)} and is at least quasi-polynomially stronger. We show that ...