Undecidable complexity statements in -arithmetic

Abstract

The failure of a large and diverse body of work to settle some of the now-classical questions of computational complexity (notably P =? NP) suggests that they might not, in fact, be resolvable by established proof techniques.Hartmanis and Hopcroft [HH] raised the issue of independent statements about computational complexity in 1976, constructing, for any consistent r.e. theory T capable of expressing statements about Turing machines, a Turing machine MT such that statements which intuitively express the computational complexity of MT are independent of T. Their technique involves a simple diagonalizing search over the theorems of T. In this paper we prove a constructive version of their independence result in the context of a generalization of a hierarchy of free variable logics defined by Rose [R1]. These logics are based on an axiomatized treatment of an extension by Löb and Wainer [LW] of Grzegorczyk's [G] hierarchy into the transfinite. Associated with each extended Grzegorczyk class (relative to an ordinal notation system S satisfying certain conditions) is the logic -arithmetic.Free variable logics are interesting from the perspective of theoretical computer science. We may construe the equational definition of functions as a form of programming system. Each -arithmetic, then, has the nice property of containing both a programming system and a logic for stating and proving facts about programs.