Elementary Linear Logic Revisited for Polynomial Time and an Exponential Time Hierarchy

International audienceElementary linear logic is a simple variant of linear logic, introduced by Girard and which characterizes in the proofs-as-programs approach the class of elementary functions, that is to say computable in time bounded by a tower of exponentials of fixed height. Our goal here is to show that despite its simplicity, elementary linear logic can nevertheless be used as a common framework to characterize the different levels of a hierarchy of deterministic time complexity classes, within elementary time. We consider a variant of this logic with type fixpoints and weakening. By selecting specific types we then characterize the class P of polynomial time predicates and more generally the hierarchy of classes k-EXP, for k ≥ 0, where k-EXP is the union of DTIME (2_k^{n^i}) , for i ≥ 1