Consequences of Polylogarithmic Membership Comparability for SAT

Abstract

We study the consequences of membership comparators that exclude one possible membership vector, deterministically or with a relative advantage over uniform guessing. For every polynomially bounded arity, a randomized polynomial-time comparator of error at most $(1-1/poly(n))2^{-t}$ gives $ NP/ poly\cap coNP/ poly$ recognition with common advice. The proof uses limited independence, polynomial occurrence certificates, and a self-contained positive-relation advice transfer. For SAT at arity $O((\log n)^d)$, both this relative-gap hypothesis and deterministic comparability imply $PH=S^{NP}$, the uniform bound $PH\subseteq BPTIME(2^{O((\log n)^{d^2})})$, and symmetric verification with polynomial-length certificates and an oracle-free deterministic $2^{O((\log n)^d)}$ predicate. Polynomial-advice deterministic decoding has the same exponent $d$. Applying the randomized simulation to an unconditional diagonal language yields, for every fixed $\varepsilon>0$, $\mathrm{BPP}\subsetneq BPTIME(2^{O((\log n)^{d^2+\varepsilon})})$, without advice. The larger clock remains subexponential under every fixed number of self-compositions. A layered oracle satisfies deterministic comparability and $NP^O=coNP^O$ but excludes randomized NP algorithms with smaller logarithmic power, establishing a relativized limit on the SAT exponent $d$. This expanded version also develops the full weak-advantage regime, where saving $2^{-O((log n)^d)}$ gives randomized SAT exponent $d$ and PH exponent $d^k$ at fixed level $k$; the quasipolynomial and exponential hierarchy consequences; binary-comparator advice bounds; and the certificate-length boundary between the randomized regimes. Under deterministic comparability, uniform deterministic promise-unique search additionally gives $UEXP=EXP$. The ordinary second-level collapse $PH=Σ_2^p$ for $d>1$ remains unproved.