A note on propositional proof complexity of some Ramsey-type statements

A Ramsey statement denoted ${n \longrightarrow (k)^2_2}$ says that every undirected graph on n vertices contains either a clique or an independent set of size k. Any such valid statement can be encoded into a valid DNF formula RAM(n, k) of size O(n ^k ) and with terms of size ${\left(\begin{smallmatrix}k\\2\end{smallmatrix}\right)}$ . Let r _k be the minimal n for which the statement holds. We prove that RAM(r _k , k) requires exponential size constant depth Frege systems, answering a problem of Krishnamurthy and Moll 15]. As a consequence of Pudlák??s work in bounded arithmetic 19] it is known that there are quasi-polynomial size constant depth Frege proofs of RAM(4 ^k , k), but the proof complexity of these formulas in resolution R or in its extension R(log) is unknown. We define two relativizations of the Ramsey statement that still have quasi-polynomial size constant depth Frege proofs but for which we establish exponential lower bound for R.