Incremental Branching Programs

We propose a new model of restricted branching programs specific to solving GEN problems, which we call incremental branching programs. We show that syntactic incremental branching programs capture previously studied models of computation for the problem GEN, namely marking machines [Co74] and Poon's extension [Po93] of jumping automata on graphs [CoRa80]. We then prove exponential size lower bounds for our syntactic incremental model, and for some other variants of branching program computation for GEN. We further show that nondeterministic syntactic incremental branching programs are provably stronger than their deterministic counterpart when solving a natural NL-complete GEN subproblem. It remains open if syntactic incremental branching programs are as powerful as unrestricted branching programs for GEN problems.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: CSR
• Authors: Anna Gál, Michal Koucký, Pierre McKenzie
• Keywords: Branching Programs, CSR 2006, Incremental Branching Programs, Syntactic Incremental Branching, Theoretical Computer Science