Unifying the Landscape of Cell-Probe Lower Bounds

Abstract: We show that a large fraction of the data-structure lower bounds known today in fact follow by reduction from the communication complexity of lopsided (asymmetric) set disjointness. This includes lower bounds for: * high-dimensional problems, where the goal is to show large space lower bounds. * constant-dimensional geometric problems, where the goal is to bound the query time for space O(n polylog n). * dynamic problems, where we are looking for a trade-off between query and update time. (In this case, our bounds are slightly weaker than the originals, losing a lglg n factor.) Our reductions also imply the following new results: * an Omega(lg n / lglg n) bound for 4-dimensional range reporting, given space O(n polylog n). This is quite timely, since a recent result solved 3D reporting in O(lglg n) time, raising the prospect that higher dimensions could also be easy. * a tight space lower bound for the partial match problem, for constant query time. * the first lower bound for reachability oracles. In the process, we prove optimal randomized lower bounds for lopsided set disjointness.