Trade-Off Lower Bounds for Stack Machines

—A space bounded Stack Machine is a regular Turing Machine with a read-only input tape, several space bounded read-write work tapes, and an unbounded stack. Stack Machines with a logarithmic space bound have been connected to other classical models of computation, such as polynomial time Turing Machines (P) (Cook; 1971) and polynomial size, polylogarithmic depth, bounded fan-in circuits (NC) e.g., (Borodin et al.; 1989). In this paper, we give the first known lower bound for Stack Machines. This comes in the form of a trade-off lower bound between space and number of passes over the input tape. Specifically, we give an explicit permuted inner product function such that any Stack Machine computing this function requires either sublinear polynomial space or sublinear polynomial number of passes. In the case of logarithmic space Stack Machines, this yields an unconditional sublinear polynomial lower bound for the number of passes. To put this result in perspective, we note that Stack ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: COCO
• Authors: Matei David, Periklis A. Papakonstantinou
• Keywords: Algorithms, COCO 2010, Lower Bounds, Stack Machines, Trade-off Lower Bounds