Algebra and the Complexity of Digraph CSPs: a Survey

We present a brief survey of some of the key results on the interplay between algebraic and graph-theoretic methods in the study of the complexity of digraph-based constraint satisfaction problems

Triangulations, orientals, and skew monoidal categories

A concrete model of the free skew-monoidal category Fsk on a single generating object is obtained. The situation is clubbable in the sense of G.M. Kelly, so this allows a description of the free skew-monoidal category on any category. As the objects of Fsk are meaningfully bracketed words in the skew unit I and the generating object X, it is necessary to examine bracketings and to find the appropriate kinds of morphisms between them. This leads us to relationships between triangulations of polygons, the Tamari lattice, left and right bracketing functions, and the orientals. A consequence of our description of Fsk is a coherence theorem asserting the existence of a strictly structure-preserving faithful functor from Fsk to the skew-monoidal category of finite non-empty ordinals and first-element-and-order-preserving functions. This in turn provides a complete solution to the word problem for skew monoidal categories.Comment: 48 page

The number of clones determined by disjunctions of unary relations

We consider finitary relations (also known as crosses) that are definable via finite disjunctions of unary relations, i.e. subsets, taken from a fixed finite parameter set $\Gamma$. We prove that whenever $\Gamma$ contains at least one non-empty relation distinct from the full carrier set, there is a countably infinite number of polymorphism clones determined by relations that are disjunctively definable from $\Gamma$. Finally, we extend our result to finitely related polymorphism clones and countably infinite sets $\Gamma$.Comment: manuscript to be published in Theory of Computing System

Quantified Constraints in Twenty Seventeen

I present a survey of recent advances in the algorithmic and computational complexity theory of non-Boolean Quantified Constraint Satisfaction Problems, incorporating some more modern research directions

A Categorical Construction of the Real Unit Interval

The real unit interval is the fundamental building block for many branches of mathematics like probability theory, measure theory, convex sets and homotopy theory. However, a priori the unit interval could be considered an arbitrary choice and one can wonder if there is some more canonical way in which the unit interval can be constructed. In this paper we find such a construction by using the theory of effect algebras. We show that the real unit interval is the unique non-initial, non-final irreducible algebra of a particular monad on the category of bounded posets. The algebras of this monad carry an order, multiplication, addition and complement, and as such model much of the operations we need to do on probabilities. On a technical level, we show that both the categories of omega-complete effect algebras as well as that of omega-complete effect monoids are monadic over the category of bounded posets using Beck's monadicity theorem. The characterisation of the real unit interval then follows easily using a recent representation theorem for omega-complete effect monoids.Comment: 13 pages + 2 page appendi