On bounded depth proofs for Tseitin formulas on the grid; revisited

09/13/2022

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by   Johan Håstad, et al.

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We study Frege proofs using depth-d Boolean formulas for the Tseitin contradiction on n × n grids. We prove that if each line in the proof is of size M then the number of lines is exponential in n/(log M)^O(d). This strengthens a recent result of Pitassi et al. [PRT22]. The key technical step is a multi-switching lemma extending the switching lemma of Håstad [Hås20] for a space of restrictions related to the Tseitin contradiction. The strengthened lemma also allows us to improve the lower bound for standard proof size of bounded depth Frege refutations from exponential in Ω̃(n^1/59d) to exponential in Ω̃(n^1/(2d-1)).