Satisfiability certificates verifiable in subexponential time

Abstract

It is common to classify satisfiability problems by their time complexity. We consider another complexity measure, namely the length of certificates (witnesses). Our results show that there is a similarity between these two types of complexity if we deal with certificates verifiable in subexponential time. In particular, the well-known result by Impagliazzo and Paturi [IP01] on the dependence of the time complexity of k-SAT on k has its counterpart for the certificate complexity: we show that, assuming the exponential time hypothesis (ETH), the certificate complexity of k-SAT increases infinitely often as k grows. Another example of time-complexity results that can be translated into the certificate-complexity setting is the results of [CIP06] on the relationship between the complexity of k-SAT and the complexity of SAT restricted to formulas of constant clause density. We also consider the certificate complexity of CircuitSAT and observe that if CircuitSAT has subexponential-time verifiable certificates of length cn, where c < 1 is a constant and n is the number of inputs, then an unlikely collapse happens (in particular, ETH fails). © 2011 Springer-Verlag.