The P-Completeness of Inverted Index Traversal: On the Complexity of Evaluating Boolean Query DAGs

Apple ML Research··

Modern AI agents increasingly rely on search infrastructure to execute complex, neuro-symbolic reasoning workflows. These workflows often compile into deeply nested, non-monotonic Boolean queries over text fields. However, standard query evaluation strategies over inverted indices face severe theoretical limits when handling these structures. Stateful iterator models (Document-at-a-Time) are structurally bounded by NC^1 formula evaluation, suffering a worst-case O(2^|Q|) exponential blowup in qu...

Read full article →

Related Articles

OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors
donsupreme · Hacker News · 3mo ago
Accelerating Gemma 4: faster inference with multi-token prediction drafters
amrrs · Hacker News · 3mo ago
A couple million lines of Haskell: Production engineering at Mercury
unignorant · Hacker News · 3mo ago
Using “underdrawings” for accurate text and numbers
samcollins · Hacker News · 3mo ago
ProgramBench: Can language models rebuild programs from scratch?
jonbaer · Hacker News · 3mo ago