On sharing, memoization, and polynomial time
Martin Avanzini, Ugo Dal Lago · Information and Computation · 2018
We study how the adoption of an evaluation mechanism with sharing and memoization impacts the class of functions which can be computed in polynomial time. We first show how a natural cost model in which lookup for an already computed result has no cost is indeed invariant. As a corollary, we then prove that the most general notion of ramified recurrence is sound for polynomial time, this way settling an open problem in implicit computational complexity.