Incremental Branching Programs

  • Authors:
  • Anna Gál;Michal Koucký;Pierre McKenzie

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Texas at Austin, Dept. of Computer Science, 78712, Austin, TX, USA;Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Institute of Mathematics, 78712, Prague, TX, Czech Republic;Université de Montréal, Dept. d’Informatique et recherche opérationnelle, C.P. 6128, succ. Centre-Ville, H3C 3J7, Montréal, Québec, Canada

  • Venue:
  • Theory of Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

We propose a new model of restricted branching programs specific to solving GEN problems, which we call incremental branching programs. We show that syntactic incremental branching programs capture previously studied models of computation for the problem GEN, namely marking machines (Cook, S.A. in J. Comput. Syst. Sci. 9(3):308–316, 1974) and Poon’s extension (Proc. of the 34th IEEE Symp. on the Foundations of Computer Science, pp. 218–227, 1993) of jumping automata on graphs (Cook, S.A., Rackoff, C.W. in SIAM J. Comput. 9:636–652, 1980). We then prove exponential size lower bounds for our syntactic incremental model, and for some other variants of branching program computation for GEN. We further show that nondeterministic syntactic incremental branching programs are provably stronger than their deterministic counterpart when solving a natural NL-complete GEN sub-problem. It remains open if syntactic incremental branching programs are as powerful as unrestricted branching programs for GEN problems.