Breakthrough: Simulating Time Complexity in Square-Root Space
New research shows that any multitape Turing machine running in time t can be simulated in only O(√(t log t)) space. This significantly improves upon the O(t/log t) space simulation from Hopcroft et al. 50 years ago. The research leverages a recently discovered space-efficient algorithm for Tree Evaluation by Cook and Mertz, reducing the time simulation problem to a series of implicitly-defined Tree Evaluation instances with favorable parameters. Results imply that bounded fan-in circuits of size s can be evaluated in √s·poly(log s) space, and suggest the existence of problems solvable in O(n) space that require n^(2-ε) time on a multitape Turing machine (for all ε > 0), making slight progress on the P versus PSPACE problem.
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