On the Containment Problem for Linear Sets

It is well known that the containment problem (as well as the equivalence problem) for semilinear sets is log-complete at the second level of the polynomial hierarchy (where hardness even holds in dimension 1). It had been shown quite recently that already the containment problem for multi-dimensional linear sets is log-complete at the same level of the hierarchy (where hardness even holds when numbers are encoded in unary). In this paper, we show that already the containment problem for 1-dimensional linear sets (with binary encoding of the numerical input parameters) is log-hard (and therefore also log-complete) at this level. However, combining both restrictions (dimension 1 and unary encoding), the problem becomes solvable in polynomial time

On the power of ordering in linear arithmetic theories

We study the problems of deciding whether a relation definable by a first-order formula in linear rational or linear integer arithmetic with an order relation is definable in absence of the order relation. Over the integers, this problem was shown decidable by Choffrut and Frigeri [Discret. Math. Theor. C., 12(1), pp. 21 - 38, 2010], albeit with non-elementary time complexity. Our contribution is to establish a full geometric characterisation of those sets definable without order which in turn enables us to prove coNP-completeness of this problem over the rationals and to establish an elementary upper bound over the integers. We also provide a complementary ??^P lower bound for the integer case that holds even in a fixed dimension. This lower bound is obtained by showing that universality for ultimately periodic sets, i.e., semilinear sets in dimension one, is ??^P-hard, which resolves an open problem of Huynh [Elektron. Inf.verarb. Kybern., 18(6), pp. 291 - 338, 1982]