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Proof Complexity and Feasible Interpolation

Published: May 5, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2505.03002v1

By: Amirhossein Akbar Tabatabai

Potential Business Impact:

Finds ways to make math proofs much harder.

Business Areas:
Natural Language Processing Artificial Intelligence, Data and Analytics, Software

This is a survey on propositional proof complexity aimed at introducing the basics of the field with a particular focus on a method known as feasible interpolation. This method is used to construct "hard theorems" for several proof systems for both classical and non-classical logics. Here, a "hard theorem" refers to a theorem in the logic whose shortest proofs are super-polynomially long in the length of the theorem itself. To make this survey more accessible, we only assume a basic familiarity with propositional, modal, and first-order logic, as well as a basic understanding of the key concepts in computational complexity, such as the definitions of the classes $\mathbf{NP}$ and $\mathbf{PSPACE}$. Any additional concepts will be introduced and explained as needed.

Page Count
58 pages

Category
Mathematics:
Logic