132 research outputs found

    The umbilical cord of finite model theory

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    Model theory was born and developed as a part of mathematical logic. It has various application domains but is not beholden to any of them. A priori, the research area known as finite model theory would be just a part of model theory but didn't turn out that way. There is one application domain -- relational database management -- that finite model theory had been beholden to during a substantial early period when databases provided the motivation and were the main application target for finite model theory. Arguably, finite model theory was motivated even more by complexity theory. But the subject of this paper is how relational database theory influenced finite model theory. This is NOT a scholarly history of the subject with proper credits to all participants. My original intent was to cover just the developments that I witnessed or participated in. The need to make the story coherent forced me to cover some additional developments.Comment: To be published in the Logic in Computer Science column of the February 2023 issue of the Bulletin of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Scienc

    Representations of choice situations

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    An Improved Homomorphism Preservation Theorem From Lower Bounds in Circuit Complexity

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    Previous work of the author [Rossmann\u2708] showed that the Homomorphism Preservation Theorem of classical model theory remains valid when its statement is restricted to finite structures. In this paper, we give a new proof of this result via a reduction to lower bounds in circuit complexity, specifically on the AC0 formula size of the colored subgraph isomorphism problem. Formally, we show the following: if a first-order sentence of quantifier-rank k is preserved under homomorphisms on finite structures, then it is equivalent on finite structures to an existential-positive sentence of quantifier-rank poly(k). Quantitatively, this improves the result of [Rossmann\u2708], where the upper bound on quantifier-rank is a non-elementary function of k

    Primary Facets Of Order Polytopes

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    Mixture models on order relations play a central role in recent investigations of transitivity in binary choice data. In such a model, the vectors of choice probabilities are the convex combinations of the characteristic vectors of all order relations of a chosen type. The five prominent types of order relations are linear orders, weak orders, semiorders, interval orders and partial orders. For each of them, the problem of finding a complete, workable characterization of the vectors of probabilities is crucial---but it is reputably inaccessible. Under a geometric reformulation, the problem asks for a linear description of a convex polytope whose vertices are known. As for any convex polytope, a shortest linear description comprises one linear inequality per facet. Getting all of the facet-defining inequalities of any of the five order polytopes seems presently out of reach. Here we search for the facet-defining inequalities which we call primary because their coefficients take only the values -1, 0 or 1. We provide a classification of all primary, facet-defining inequalities of three of the five order polytopes. Moreover, we elaborate on the intricacy of the primary facet-defining inequalities of the linear order and the weak order polytopes
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