ABSTRACT. In answer to Ko's question raised in 1983, we show that an initial value problem given by a polynomial-time computable, Lipschitz continuous function can have a polynomial-space complete solution. The key insight is simple: the Lipschitz condition means that the feedback in the differential equation is weak. We define a class of polynomial-space computation tableaux with equally restricted feedback, and show that they are still polynomial-space complete. The same technique also settles Ko's two later questions on Volterra integral equations.Let gW OE0; 1 R ! R be a continuous function and consider the initial value problemThe Picard-Lindelöf (or Cauchy-Lipschitz) Theorem [15] states 1 that this equation has a unique solution hW OE0; 1 ! R if g is Lipschitz continuous (along its second argument), i. e., (2) jg.t; y 0 / g.t; y 1 /j Ä Z jy 0 y 1 j; t 2 OE0; 1; y 0 ; y 1 2 R for some constant Z independent of y 0 , y 1 and t . We are interested in the computational complexity of the solution h under this condition. Our model of computation of real functions is reviewed in Section 1. It is adopted from computable analysis and is thus consistent with the conventional notion of computability (see Section 5.3 for other perspectives on the "complexity" of similar problems). We formulate our main result in Section 2: the solution of the above equation can be polynomialspace complete, even if g is polynomial-time computable. This was open since 1983 [18]. The proof will be given in Section 3. The main idea is to regard the differential equation with the Lipschitz condition as a polynomial-space computation tableau with certain restrictions. In Section 4, we use the same techniques solve several other problems, including the ones about Volterra integral equations [20]. Section 5 discusses related results and problems.Key words and phrases. computable analysis; computational complexity; exponential space; initial value problem; Lipschitz condition; ordinary differential equations; Picard-Lindelöf Theorem; polynomial space; Volterra integral equations.This work was supported in part by the Nakajima Foundation and by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.1 There are several variants of the theorem; here is a proof sketch for ours. Let C be the set of all continuous real functions on OE0; 1. A solution of (1) is a fixed point of the operator T W C ! C defined byThis solution exists and is unique by the Banach fixed point theorem, because T is a contraction with respect to the distance d given by d.h 0 ; h 1 / D max t2OE0;1 exp. 2Zt /jh 0 .t/ h 1 .t/j for h 0 , h 1 2 C . To compute a real function f , the machine should output an approximation of f .t / to given precision 2 m by consulting the oracle for approximations of t to any precision 2 n it desires (left). An alternative picture (right) is that the machine converts any stream of improving approximations of t to a stream of improving approximations of f .t/.