Abstract

Abstract. We improve upon indirect diagonalization arguments for lower bounds on explicit problems within the polynomial hierarchy. Our contributions are summarized as follows. 1. We present a technique that uniformly improves upon most known nonlinear time lower bounds for nondeterminism andalternating computation, on both subpolynomial (n o(1) ) space RAMs and sequential one-tape machines with random access to the input. We obtain improved lower bounds for Boolean satisfiability (SAT), as well as all NP-complete problems that have efficient reductions from SAT, and Σk-SAT, for constant k ≥ 2. For example, SAT cannot be solved by random access machines using n √ 3 time and subpolynomial space. 2. We show how indirect diagonalization leads to time-space lower bounds for computation with bounded nondeterminism. For both the random access and multitape Turing machine models, we prove that for all k ≥ 1, there is a constant ck> 1 such that linear time with n 1/k nondeterministic bits is not contained in deterministic n ck time with subpolynomial space. This is used to prove that satisfiability of Boolean circuits with n inputs and n k size cannot be solved by deterministic multitape Turing machines running in n k·ck time and subpolynomial space.

Citations