Order Invariance on Decomposable Structures

Order-invariant formulas access an ordering on a structure's universe, but the model relation is independent of the used ordering. Order invariance is frequently used for logic-based approaches in computer science. Order-invariant formulas capture unordered problems of complexity classes and they model the independence of the answer to a database query from low-level aspects of databases. We study the expressive power of order-invariant monadic second-order (MSO) and first-order (FO) logic on restricted classes of structures that admit certain forms of tree decompositions (not necessarily of bounded width). While order-invariant MSO is more expressive than MSO and, even, CMSO (MSO with modulo-counting predicates), we show that order-invariant MSO and CMSO are equally expressive on graphs of bounded tree width and on planar graphs. This extends an earlier result for trees due to Courcelle. Moreover, we show that all properties definable in order-invariant FO are also definable in MSO on these classes. These results are applications of a theorem that shows how to lift up definability results for order-invariant logics from the bags of a graph's tree decomposition to the graph itself.Comment: Accepted for LICS 201

A limit law of almost ll-partite graphs

For integers $l \geq 2$, $d \geq 1$ we study (undirected) graphs with vertices $1, ..., n$ such that the vertices can be partitioned into $l$ parts such that every vertex has at most $d$ neighbours in its own part. The set of all such graphs is denoted \mbP_n(l,d). We prove a labelled first-order limit law, i.e., for every first-order sentence $\varphi$, the proportion of graphs in \mbP_n(l,d) that satisfy $\varphi$ converges as $n \to \infty$. By combining this result with a result of Hundack, Pr\"omel and Steger \cite{HPS} we also prove that if $1 \leq s_1 \leq ... \leq s_l$ are integers, then \mb{Forb}(\mcK_{1, s_1, ..., s_l}) has a labelled first-order limit law, where \mb{Forb}(\mcK_{1, s_1, ..., s_l}) denotes the set of all graphs with vertices $1, ..., n$, for some $n$, in which there is no subgraph isomorphic to the complete $(l+1)$-partite graph with parts of sizes $1, s_1, ..., s_l$. In the course of doing this we also prove that there exists a first-order formula $\xi$ (depending only on $l$ and $d$) such that the proportion of \mcG \in \mbP_n(l,d) with the following property approaches 1 as $n \to \infty$: there is a unique partition of $\{1, ..., n\}$ into $l$ parts such that every vertex has at most $d$ neighbours in its own part, and this partition, viewed as an equivalence relation, is defined by $\xi$

The genus of curve, pants and flip graphs

This article is about the graph genus of certain well studied graphs in surface theory: the curve, pants and flip graphs. We study both the genus of these graphs and the genus of their quotients by the mapping class group. The full graphs, except for in some low complexity cases, all have infinite genus. The curve graph once quotiented by the mapping class group has the genus of a complete graph so its genus is well known by a theorem of Ringel and Youngs. For the other two graphs we are able to identify the precise growth rate of the graph genus in terms of the genus of the underlying surface. The lower bounds are shown using probabilistic methods.Comment: 26 pages, 9 figure