An exponential lower bound for real-time branching programs

Abstract

Branching programs are a general model of sequential computation. One of their computational features is their possibility to question (repeatedly) the information from each input bit. Real-time branching programs make at most n questions when computing on an input of length n. The restriction “real-time” allows to find a simple language which requires the lower bound 2^√2n/8 on memory (= the state space).