This thesis is primarily focussed on time-space tradeoffs for decision problems. Branching programs have turned out to be very useful for this study.; We first resolve some long-standing open problems regarding upper bounds on the branching program size for certain simple functions. We construct branching programs of size o(n log2 n/ log log n) for threshold functions and of size o(n log4n) for determining the sum of the input bits modulo a fixed divisor. These improve the previously best constructions of O(n 3/2) due to Lupanov [Lup65].; We then consider a restricted class called syntactic read-k branching programs [BRS93] where each variable is tested at most k times on any path. For every k, we exhibit two explicit functions that can be computed by linear-sized read-(k + 1) branching programs but require size to be computed by non-deterministic or randomized syntactic read- k branching programs with 2-sided error , for some > 0. This exponential separation was conjectured by various authors [Weg88, SS93a, Pon95], and was previously known only between k = 1 and k = 2 [Weg88]. For the stronger semantic read- k model, where the read restriction applies only to computation paths, we give the first separation result showing that polynomial-size semantic read-twice branching programs can compute functions that require exponential size on syntactic read-k branching programs.; On the general Boolean branching program model, we obtain the first non-trivial timespace tradeoff lower bound for computing decision problems by exhibiting a Boolean function requiring exponential size to be computed by any branching program of length cn, for some constant c > 1. For the more general R-way branching programs [BRS93], we give, for any k, a function that requires exponential size to be computed by length kn q-way branching programs, for some q = q(k).; Finally, we consider branching programs and their variants such as OBDDs [Bry86], *-BMDs [BC95], HDDs [CFZ95], MTBDDs [CMZ+93] and EVBDDs [LS92], that have been used as representations of Boolean and integer functions for symbolic model checking [McM93]. We introduce a lower bound technique that applies to a broad spectrum of such functional representations. We apply this technique to show exponential size bounds for many integer and Boolean functions that arise in symbolic model checking. We give the first examples of integer functions including integer division, remainder, high/low-order words of multiplication, square root and reciprocal that require exponential size in all these representations.
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机译:本文主要针对决策问题的时空权衡。分支程序对本研究非常有用。我们首先解决一些长期存在的开放问题,这些问题涉及某些简单功能的分支程序大小的上限。我们构造大小为 o italic>( n italic> log 2 super> n italic> / log log n italic的分支程序>)用于确定阈值函数,其大小为 o italic>( n italic> log 4 super> n italic>),用于确定输入的总和固定除数的位。由于Lupanov [Lup65],这些改进了以前最好的 O italic>( n italic> 3/2 super>)结构。然后,我们考虑一个称为语法读取k分支程序[BRS93]的受限类,其中,每个变量在任何路径上最多测试 k italic>次。对于每个 k italic>,我们展示两个显式函数,这些函数可以通过线性大小的read-( k italic> + 1)分支程序来计算,但需要大小为展开▼