The cost of a cycle is a square

Abstract

AbstractThe logical flow graphs of sequent calculus proofs might contain oriented cycles. For the predicate calculus the elimination of cycles might be non-elementary and this was shown in [Car96]. For the propositional calculus, we prove that if a proof of k lines contains n cycles then there exists an acyclic proof with (kn+1) lines. In particular, there is a polynomial time algorithm which eliminates cycles from a proof. These results are motivated by the search for general methods on proving lower bounds on proof size and by the design of more efficient heuristic algorithms for proof search.