Characterizing Tseitin-formulas with short regular resolution refutations

Abstract

Tseitin-formulas are systems of parity constraints whose structure is described by a graph. These formulas have been studied extensively in proof complexity as hard instances in many proof systems. In this paper, we prove that a class of unsatisfiable Tseitin-formulas of bounded degree has regular resolution refutations of polynomial length if and only if the treewidth of all underlying graphs $G$ for that class is in $O(\log |V(G)|)$. To do so, we show that any regular resolution refutation of an unsatisfiable Tseitin-formula with graph $G$ of bounded degree has length $2^{\Omega (tw(G))}/|V(G)|$, thus essentially matching the known $2^{O(tw(G))}poly(|V(G)|)$ upper bound up. Our proof first connects the length of regular resolution refutations of unsatisfiable Tseitin-formulas to the size of representations of \textit{satisfiable} Tseitin-formulas in decomposable negation normal form (DNNF). Then we prove that for every graph $G$ of bounded degree, every DNNF-representation of every satisfiable Tseitin-formula with graph $G$ must have size $2^{\Omega (tw(G))}$ which yields our lower bound for regular resolution.

20 pages including references