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Failure of the strong feasible disjunction property

cstheory.com April 7, 2026
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Authors: Jan Krajicek

A propositional proof system $P$ has the strong feasible disjunction property iff there is a constant $c \geq 1$ such that whenever $P$ admits a size $s$ proof of $\bigvee_i α_i$ with no two $α_i$ sharing an atom then one of $α_i$ has a $P$-proof of size $\le s^c$. It was proved by K. (2025) that no proof system strong enough admits this property assuming a computational complexity conjecture and a conjecture about proof complexity generators. Here we build on Ilango (2025) and Ren et al. (2025) and prove the same result under two purely computational complexity hypotheses: - there exists a language in class E that requires exponential size circuits even if they are allowed to query an NP oracle, - there exists a P/poly demi-bit in the sense of Rudich (1997).

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