How statement and proof provenance work
The first chip identifies the source of the statement or construction; the second identifies the source of its local proof or verification.
- Literature-sourced: the exact statement appears in a cited source; only wording and notation differ.
- AI-adapted: a semantically identical restatement of literature-sourced material, modulo indexing, notation, and boundary cases adopted by the library.
- AI-generated: a genuinely novel statement formulated by AI, with no source for the claim itself.
These labels describe origin, not correctness: citations and verification chips remain separate evidence.
The bounded reachability recursion uses logarithmic recursion depth
Statement
Let be a finite digraph with vertices, numbered by . To decide whether a directed path exists from to , it is enough to evaluate with when and when . This recursion has depth at most , each stack frame stores bits, and the whole deterministic search therefore uses space. In particular, if for some constant , then the search uses space.
Facts & Assumptions
Given: a finite digraph with numbered vertices.
is intended to decide existence of a path of length at most , and its recursive definition decreases by one at each call (The bounded reachability recursion for directed paths of length at most 2^i).
A space- machine has at most configurations (A machine using space s(n) has at most exponentially many configurations).
Proof
If , the only possible path question is settled by . Suppose now that . Any directed path with repeated vertices can be shortened by deleting a directed cycle, so if reaches at all then reaches by a simple directed path. A simple directed path in an -vertex digraph has length at most , and .
By [L1], every recursive call decreases the index by one, so starting from that initial yields recursion depth at most .
One stack frame stores the current vertices , , a midpoint candidate , and the current index . Each of these numbers is below , so one frame uses bits. Multiplying by the depth from step 2.1 gives total space .
If , then , and step 3.1 becomes . The last sentence follows; [L2] records exactly the configuration bound that supplies such an in Savitch's theorem.
Depends on
Used by
Dependency tree · two levels
5 results within two dependency steps of this one, each drawn at its shortest distance from it. An arrow runs from a result to what uses it, so the chart reads left to right and ends at this result, which carries a heavier outline. Every node is a link to that result. Click elsewhere on the chart to enlarge it.
Sources
- Eric Blais, Models of Computation, 17. Space Complexity (standard reference, not scraped)
- Sanjeev Arora and Boaz Barak, Computational Complexity: A Modern Approach (standard reference, not scraped)