The study of branching programs for the Tree Evaluation Problem, introduced by S. Cook et al. (TOCT 2012), remains one of the most promising approaches to separating L from P. Given a label in $[k]$ at each leaf of a complete binary tree and an explicit function in $[k]^2 \to ... more >>>

We show that the Tree Evaluation Problem with alphabet size $k$ and height $h$ can be solved by branching programs of size $k^{O(h/\log h)} + 2^{O(h)}$. This answers a longstanding challenge of Cook et al. (2009) and gives the first general upper bound since the problem's inception.

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The Tree Evaluation Problem ($TreeEval$) (Cook et al. 2009) is a central candidate for separating polynomial time ($P$) from logarithmic space ($L$) via composition. While space lower bounds of $\Omega(\log^2 n)$ are known for multiple restricted models, it was recently shown by Cook and Mertz (2020) that TreeEval can be ... more >>>