Changing Partitions in Rectangle Decision Lists

Rectangle decision lists are a form of decision lists that were recently shown to have applications in the proof complexity of certain OBDD-based QBF-solvers. We consider a version of rectangle decision lists with changing partitions, which corresponds to QBF-solvers that may change the variable order of the OBDDs they produce. We show that even allowing one single partition change generally leads to exponentially more succinct decision lists. More generally, we show that there is a succinctness hierarchy: for every k ∈ ℕ, when going from k partition changes to k+1, there are functions that can be represented exponentially more succinctly. As an application, we show a similar hierarchy for OBDD-based QBF-solvers.

Authors

• Stefan Mengel

Keywords

• rectangle decision lists
• QBF proof complexity
• OBDD