Elementary linear logic revisited for polynomial time and an exponential time hierarchy (extended version)

Nombre de pages: 20. Une version courte de ce travail est à paraître dans les actes de: Asian Symposium on Programming Languages and Systems (APLAS 2011).Elementary 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 (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