Online research in philosophy

We consider combinatorial principles based on playing several two person games simultaneously. We call strategies for playing two or more games simultaneously parallel. The principles are easy consequences of the determinacy of games, in particular they are true for all finite games. We shall show that the principles fail for infinite games. The statements of these principles are of lower logical complexity than the sentence expressing the determinacy of games, therefore, they can be studied in weak axiomatic systems for arithmetic (...) (Bounded Arithmetic). We pose several open problems about the provability of these statements in Bounded Arithmetic and related computational problems. (shrink)

We prove an exponential lower bound on the length of cutting plane proofs. The proof uses an extension of a lower bound for monotone circuits to circuits which compute with real numbers and use nondecreasing functions as gates. The latter result is of independent interest, since, in particular, it implies an exponential lower bound for some arithmetic circuits.

We consider the problem about the length of proofs of the sentences $\operatorname{Con}_S(\underline{n})$ saying that there is no proof of contradiction in S whose length is ≤ n. We show the relation of this problem to some problems about propositional proof systems.