1,377 research outputs found
Covering a Set with Arithmetic Progressions is NP-Complete
This paper defines a new class of set covering problems in which the subsets are implicitly derived from the properties of the set elements. In particular, the set elements are integers and the subsets are finite arithmetic progressions. Both minimum cover and exact cover problems are defined. Both problems are shown to be NP-Complete
The number of subsets of integers with no -term arithmetic progression
Addressing a question of Cameron and Erd\Ho s, we show that, for infinitely
many values of , the number of subsets of that do not
contain a -term arithmetic progression is at most , where
is the maximum cardinality of a subset of without
a -term arithmetic progression. This bound is optimal up to a constant
factor in the exponent. For all values of , we prove a weaker bound, which
is nevertheless sufficient to transfer the current best upper bound on
to the sparse random setting. To achieve these bounds, we establish a new
supersaturation result, which roughly states that sets of size
contain superlinearly many -term arithmetic progressions.
For integers and , Erd\Ho s asked whether there is a set of integers
with no -term arithmetic progression, but such that any -coloring
of yields a monochromatic -term arithmetic progression. Ne\v{s}et\v{r}il
and R\"odl, and independently Spencer, answered this question affirmatively. We
show the following density version: for every and , there
exists a reasonably dense subset of primes with no -term arithmetic
progression, yet every of size contains a
-term arithmetic progression.
Our proof uses the hypergraph container method, which has proven to be a very
powerful tool in extremal combinatorics. The idea behind the container method
is to have a small certificate set to describe a large independent set. We give
two further applications in the appendix using this idea.Comment: To appear in International Mathematics Research Notices. This is a
longer version than the journal version, containing two additional minor
applications of the container metho
A cookbook for temporal conceptual data modelling with description logic
We design temporal description logics suitable for reasoning about temporal conceptual data models and investigate their computational complexity. Our formalisms are based on DL-Lite logics with three types of concept inclusions (ranging from atomic concept inclusions and disjointness to the full Booleans), as well as cardinality constraints and role inclusions. In the temporal dimension, they capture future and past temporal operators on concepts, flexible and rigid roles, the operators `always' and `some time' on roles, data assertions for particular moments of time and global concept inclusions. The logics are interpreted over the Cartesian products of object domains and the flow of time (Z,<), satisfying the constant domain assumption. We prove that the most expressive of our temporal description logics (which can capture lifespan cardinalities and either qualitative or quantitative evolution constraints) turn out to be undecidable. However, by omitting some of the temporal operators on concepts/roles or by restricting the form of concept inclusions we obtain logics whose complexity ranges between PSpace and NLogSpace. These positive results were obtained by reduction to various clausal fragments of propositional temporal logic, which opens a way to employ propositional or first-order temporal provers for reasoning about temporal data models
Low-degree tests at large distances
We define tests of boolean functions which distinguish between linear (or
quadratic) polynomials, and functions which are very far, in an appropriate
sense, from these polynomials. The tests have optimal or nearly optimal
trade-offs between soundness and the number of queries.
In particular, we show that functions with small Gowers uniformity norms
behave ``randomly'' with respect to hypergraph linearity tests.
A central step in our analysis of quadraticity tests is the proof of an
inverse theorem for the third Gowers uniformity norm of boolean functions.
The last result has also a coding theory application. It is possible to
estimate efficiently the distance from the second-order Reed-Muller code on
inputs lying far beyond its list-decoding radius
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