A 222pn upper bound on the complexity of Presburger Arithmetic

AbstractThe decision problem for the theory of integers under addition, or “Presburger Arithmetic,” is proved to be elementary recursive in the sense of Kalmar. More precisely, it is proved that a quantifier elimination decision procedure for this theory due to Cooper determines, for any n, the truth of any sentence of length n within deterministic time 222pn for some constant p > 1. This upper bound is approximately one exponential higher than the best known lower bound on nondeterministic time. Since it seems to cost one exponential to simulate a nondeterministic algorithm with a deterministic one, it may not be possible to significantly improve either bound