Improved Space-Time Tradeoffs for Permutation Problems via Extremal Combinatorics

Abstract

We provide improved space-time tradeoffs for permutation problems over additively idempotent semi-rings. In particular, there is an algorithm for the Traveling Salesperson Problem that solves $N$-vertex instances using space $S$ and time $T$ where $S\cdot T\le 3.1861^N$. This improves a previous work by Koivisto and Parviainen [SODA'10] where $S\cdot T\le 3.9271^N$, and overcomes a barrier they identified, as their bound was shown to be optimal within their framework. To get our results, we introduce a new parameter of a set system that we call the chain efficiency. This relates the number of maximal chains contained in the set system with the cardinality of the system. We show that set systems of high efficiency imply efficient space-time tradeoffs for permutation problems, and give constructions of set systems with high chain efficiency, disproving a conjecture by Johnson, Leader and Russel [Comb. Probab. Comput.'15].

Accepted to FOCS'26. This new version improves our main bound of 3.7493 to 3.1861, which we found after reading [arxiv.org/abs/2604.05645]. Besides this improvement we only changed a few typo's