A note on blockers in posets

The blocker $A^{*}$ of an antichain $A$ in a finite poset $P$ is the set of elements minimal with the property of having with each member of $A$ a common predecessor. The following is done: 1. The posets $P$ for which $A^{**}=A$ for all antichains are characterized. 2. The blocker $A^*$ of a symmetric antichain in the partition lattice is characterized. 3. Connections with the question of finding minimal size blocking sets for certain set families are discussed

Colouring set families without monochromatic k-chains

A coloured version of classic extremal problems dates back to Erd\H{o}s and Rothschild, who in 1974 asked which $n$-vertex graph has the maximum number of 2-edge-colourings without monochromatic triangles. They conjectured that the answer is simply given by the largest triangle-free graph. Since then, this new class of coloured extremal problems has been extensively studied by various researchers. In this paper we pursue the Erd\H{o}s--Rothschild versions of Sperner's Theorem, the classic result in extremal set theory on the size of the largest antichain in the Boolean lattice, and Erd\H{o}s' extension to $k$-chain-free families. Given a family $\mathcal{F}$ of subsets of $[n]$, we define an $(r,k)$-colouring of $\mathcal{F}$ to be an $r$-colouring of the sets without any monochromatic $k$-chains $F_1 \subset F_2 \subset \dots \subset F_k$. We prove that for $n$ sufficiently large in terms of $k$, the largest $k$-chain-free families also maximise the number of $(2,k)$-colourings. We also show that the middle level, $\binom{[n]}{\lfloor n/2 \rfloor}$, maximises the number of $(3,2)$-colourings, and give asymptotic results on the maximum possible number of $(r,k)$-colourings whenever $r(k-1)$ is divisible by three.Comment: 30 pages, final versio

Chains, Antichains, and Complements in Infinite Partition Lattices

We consider the partition lattice $\Pi_\kappa$ on any set of transfinite cardinality $\kappa$ and properties of $\Pi_\kappa$ whose analogues do not hold for finite cardinalities. Assuming the Axiom of Choice we prove: (I) the cardinality of any maximal well-ordered chain is always exactly $\kappa$; (II) there are maximal chains in $\Pi_\kappa$ of cardinality $> \kappa$; (III) if, for every cardinal $\lambda < \kappa$, we have $2^{\lambda} < 2^\kappa$, there exists a maximal chain of cardinality $< 2^{\kappa}$ (but $\ge \kappa$) in $\Pi_{2^\kappa}$; (IV) every non-trivial maximal antichain in $\Pi_\kappa$ has cardinality between $\kappa$ and $2^{\kappa}$, and these bounds are realized. Moreover we can construct maximal antichains of cardinality $\max(\kappa, 2^{\lambda})$ for any $\lambda \le \kappa$; (V) all cardinals of the form $\kappa^\lambda$ with $0 \le \lambda \le \kappa$ occur as the number of complements to some partition $\mathcal{P} \in \Pi_\kappa$, and only these cardinalities appear. Moreover, we give a direct formula for the number of complements to a given partition; (VI) Under the Generalized Continuum Hypothesis, the cardinalities of maximal chains, maximal antichains, and numbers of complements are fully determined, and we provide a complete characterization.Comment: 24 pages, 2 figures. Submitted to Algebra Universalis on 27/11/201

Necessary and Sufficient Conditions on Partial Orders for Modeling Concurrent Computations

Partial orders are used extensively for modeling and analyzing concurrent computations. In this paper, we define two properties of partially ordered sets: width-extensibility and interleaving-consistency, and show that a partial order can be a valid state based model: (1) of some synchronous concurrent computation iff it is width-extensible, and (2) of some asynchronous concurrent computation iff it is width-extensible and interleaving-consistent. We also show a duality between the event based and state based models of concurrent computations, and give algorithms to convert models between the two domains. When applied to the problem of checkpointing, our theory leads to a better understanding of some existing results and algorithms in the field. It also leads to efficient detection algorithms for predicates whose evaluation requires knowledge of states from all the processes in the system

On the Complexity of Mining Itemsets from the Crowd Using Taxonomies

We study the problem of frequent itemset mining in domains where data is not recorded in a conventional database but only exists in human knowledge. We provide examples of such scenarios, and present a crowdsourcing model for them. The model uses the crowd as an oracle to find out whether an itemset is frequent or not, and relies on a known taxonomy of the item domain to guide the search for frequent itemsets. In the spirit of data mining with oracles, we analyze the complexity of this problem in terms of (i) crowd complexity, that measures the number of crowd questions required to identify the frequent itemsets; and (ii) computational complexity, that measures the computational effort required to choose the questions. We provide lower and upper complexity bounds in terms of the size and structure of the input taxonomy, as well as the size of a concise description of the output itemsets. We also provide constructive algorithms that achieve the upper bounds, and consider more efficient variants for practical situations.Comment: 18 pages, 2 figures. To be published to ICDT'13. Added missing acknowledgemen