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Paper:

TR26-006 | 5th January 2026 05:35

Separating RAM and Multitape Turing Machines with Short Random Oracles

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TR26-006
Authors: Lijie Chen, Yichuan Wang
Publication: 19th January 2026 12:00
Downloads: 51
Keywords: 


Abstract:

We prove that relative to a random oracle answering $O(\log n)$-bit queries, there exists a function computable in $O(n)$ time by a random-access machine (RAM) but requiring $n^2/polylog(n)$ time by any multitape Turing machine. This provides strong evidence that simulating RAMs on multitape Turing machines inherently incurs a nearly quadratic time overhead, since the random oracle can be heuristically instantiated by a concrete hash function such as SHA-256.



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