66 research outputs found
The descriptive complexity approach to LOGCFL
Building upon the known generalized-quantifier-based first-order
characterization of LOGCFL, we lay the groundwork for a deeper investigation.
Specifically, we examine subclasses of LOGCFL arising from varying the arity
and nesting of groupoidal quantifiers. Our work extends the elaborate theory
relating monoidal quantifiers to NC1 and its subclasses. In the absence of the
BIT predicate, we resolve the main issues: we show in particular that no single
outermost unary groupoidal quantifier with FO can capture all the context-free
languages, and we obtain the surprising result that a variant of Greibach's
``hardest context-free language'' is LOGCFL-complete under quantifier-free
BIT-free projections. We then prove that FO with unary groupoidal quantifiers
is strictly more expressive with the BIT predicate than without. Considering a
particular groupoidal quantifier, we prove that first-order logic with majority
of pairs is strictly more expressive than first-order with majority of
individuals. As a technical tool of independent interest, we define the notion
of an aperiodic nondeterministic finite automaton and prove that FO
translations are precisely the mappings computed by single-valued aperiodic
nondeterministic finite transducers.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figur
Pure Nash Equilibria: Hard and Easy Games
We investigate complexity issues related to pure Nash equilibria of strategic
games. We show that, even in very restrictive settings, determining whether a
game has a pure Nash Equilibrium is NP-hard, while deciding whether a game has
a strong Nash equilibrium is SigmaP2-complete. We then study practically
relevant restrictions that lower the complexity. In particular, we are
interested in quantitative and qualitative restrictions of the way each players
payoff depends on moves of other players. We say that a game has small
neighborhood if the utility function for each player depends only on (the
actions of) a logarithmically small number of other players. The dependency
structure of a game G can be expressed by a graph DG(G) or by a hypergraph
H(G). By relating Nash equilibrium problems to constraint satisfaction problems
(CSPs), we show that if G has small neighborhood and if H(G) has bounded
hypertree width (or if DG(G) has bounded treewidth), then finding pure Nash and
Pareto equilibria is feasible in polynomial time. If the game is graphical,
then these problems are LOGCFL-complete and thus in the class NC2 of highly
parallelizable problems
Arithmetic circuits: the chasm at depth four gets wider
In their paper on the "chasm at depth four", Agrawal and Vinay have shown
that polynomials in m variables of degree O(m) which admit arithmetic circuits
of size 2^o(m) also admit arithmetic circuits of depth four and size 2^o(m).
This theorem shows that for problems such as arithmetic circuit lower bounds or
black-box derandomization of identity testing, the case of depth four circuits
is in a certain sense the general case. In this paper we show that smaller
depth four circuits can be obtained if we start from polynomial size arithmetic
circuits. For instance, we show that if the permanent of n*n matrices has
circuits of size polynomial in n, then it also has depth 4 circuits of size
n^O(sqrt(n)*log(n)). Our depth four circuits use integer constants of
polynomial size. These results have potential applications to lower bounds and
deterministic identity testing, in particular for sums of products of sparse
univariate polynomials. We also give an application to boolean circuit
complexity, and a simple (but suboptimal) reduction to polylogarithmic depth
for arithmetic circuits of polynomial size and polynomially bounded degree
The Complexity of Bisimulation and Simulation on Finite Systems
In this paper the computational complexity of the (bi)simulation problem over
restricted graph classes is studied. For trees given as pointer structures or
terms the (bi)simulation problem is complete for logarithmic space or NC,
respectively. This solves an open problem from Balc\'azar, Gabarr\'o, and
S\'antha. Furthermore, if only one of the input graphs is required to be a
tree, the bisimulation (simulation) problem is contained in AC (LogCFL). In
contrast, it is also shown that the simulation problem is P-complete already
for graphs of bounded path-width
On Second-Order Monadic Monoidal and Groupoidal Quantifiers
We study logics defined in terms of second-order monadic monoidal and
groupoidal quantifiers. These are generalized quantifiers defined by monoid and
groupoid word-problems, equivalently, by regular and context-free languages. We
give a computational classification of the expressive power of these logics
over strings with varying built-in predicates. In particular, we show that
ATIME(n) can be logically characterized in terms of second-order monadic
monoidal quantifiers
Tree-like Queries in OWL 2 QL: Succinctness and Complexity Results
This paper investigates the impact of query topology on the difficulty of
answering conjunctive queries in the presence of OWL 2 QL ontologies. Our first
contribution is to clarify the worst-case size of positive existential (PE),
non-recursive Datalog (NDL), and first-order (FO) rewritings for various
classes of tree-like conjunctive queries, ranging from linear queries to
bounded treewidth queries. Perhaps our most surprising result is a
superpolynomial lower bound on the size of PE-rewritings that holds already for
linear queries and ontologies of depth 2. More positively, we show that
polynomial-size NDL-rewritings always exist for tree-shaped queries with a
bounded number of leaves (and arbitrary ontologies), and for bounded treewidth
queries paired with bounded depth ontologies. For FO-rewritings, we equate the
existence of polysize rewritings with well-known problems in Boolean circuit
complexity. As our second contribution, we analyze the computational complexity
of query answering and establish tractability results (either NL- or
LOGCFL-completeness) for a range of query-ontology pairs. Combining our new
results with those from the literature yields a complete picture of the
succinctness and complexity landscapes for the considered classes of queries
and ontologies.Comment: This is an extended version of a paper accepted at LICS'15. It
contains both succinctness and complexity results and adopts FOL notation.
The appendix contains proofs that had to be omitted from the conference
version for lack of space. The previous arxiv version (a long version of our
DL'14 workshop paper) only contained the succinctness results and used
description logic notatio
The model checking fingerprints of CTL operators
The aim of this study is to understand the inherent expressive power of CTL
operators. We investigate the complexity of model checking for all CTL
fragments with one CTL operator and arbitrary Boolean operators. This gives us
a fingerprint of each CTL operator. The comparison between the fingerprints
yields a hierarchy of the operators that mirrors their strength with respect to
model checking
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