A note on the complexity and tractability of the heat equation

We wish to solve the heat equation ut=Δu-qu in Id×(0,T), where I is the unit interval and T is a maximum time value, subject to homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions and to initial conditions u(·,0)=f over Id. We show that this problem is intractable if f belongs to standard Sobolev spaces, even if we have complete information about q. However, if f and q belong to a reproducing kernel Hilbert space with finite-order weights, we can show that the problem is tractable, and can actually be strongly tractable.