A Strongly Exponential Separation of DNNFs from CNF Formulas

Decomposable Negation Normal Forms (DNNFs) are Boolean circuits in negation normal form where the subcircuits leading into each AND gate are defined on disjoint sets of variables. We prove a strongly exponential lower bound on the size of DNNFs for a class of CNF formulas built from expander graphs. As a corollary, we obtain a strongly exponential separation between DNNFs and CNF formulas in prime implicates form. This settles an open problem in the area of knowledge compilation (Darwiche and Marquis, 2002).