Sub-computable Boundedness Randomness

This paper defines a new notion of bounded computable randomness for certain classes of sub-computable functions which lack a universal machine. In particular, we define such versions of randomness for primitive recursive functions and for PSPACE functions. These new notions are robust in that there are equivalent formulations in terms of (1) Martin-L\"of tests, (2) Kolmogorov complexity, and (3) martingales. We show these notions can be equivalently defined with prefix-free Kolmogorov complexity. We prove that one direction of van Lambalgen's theorem holds for relative computability, but the other direction fails. We discuss statistical properties of these notions of randomness

Hyper-polynomial hierarchies and the polynomial jump

AbstractAssuming that the polynomial hierarchy (PH) does not collapse, we show the existence of ascending sequences of ptime Turing degrees of length ω1CK in PSPACE such that successors are polynomial jumps of their predecessors. Moreover these ptime degrees are all uniformly hard for PH. This is analogous to the hyperarithmetic hierarchy, which is defined similarly but with the (computable) Turing degrees. The lack of uniform least upper bounds for ascending sequences of ptime degrees causes the limit levels of our hyper-polynomial hierarchy to be inherently non-canonical. This problem is investigated in depth, and various possible structures for hyper-polynomial hierarchies are explicated, as are properties of the polynomial jump operator on the languages which are in PSPACE but not in PH

Querying the Guarded Fragment

Evaluating a Boolean conjunctive query Q against a guarded first-order theory F is equivalent to checking whether "F and not Q" is unsatisfiable. This problem is relevant to the areas of database theory and description logic. Since Q may not be guarded, well known results about the decidability, complexity, and finite-model property of the guarded fragment do not obviously carry over to conjunctive query answering over guarded theories, and had been left open in general. By investigating finite guarded bisimilar covers of hypergraphs and relational structures, and by substantially generalising Rosati's finite chase, we prove for guarded theories F and (unions of) conjunctive queries Q that (i) Q is true in each model of F iff Q is true in each finite model of F and (ii) determining whether F implies Q is 2EXPTIME-complete. We further show the following results: (iii) the existence of polynomial-size conformal covers of arbitrary hypergraphs; (iv) a new proof of the finite model property of the clique-guarded fragment; (v) the small model property of the guarded fragment with optimal bounds; (vi) a polynomial-time solution to the canonisation problem modulo guarded bisimulation, which yields (vii) a capturing result for guarded bisimulation invariant PTIME.Comment: This is an improved and extended version of the paper of the same title presented at LICS 201

The universality of polynomial time Turing equivalence

We show that polynomial time Turing equivalence and a large class of other equivalence relations from computational complexity theory are universal countable Borel equivalence relations. We then discuss ultrafilters on the invariant Borel sets of these equivalence relations which are related to Martin's ultrafilter on the Turing degrees