449 research outputs found
Good covers are algorithmically unrecognizable
A good cover in R^d is a collection of open contractible sets in R^d such
that the intersection of any subcollection is either contractible or empty.
Motivated by an analogy with convex sets, intersection patterns of good covers
were studied intensively. Our main result is that intersection patterns of good
covers are algorithmically unrecognizable.
More precisely, the intersection pattern of a good cover can be stored in a
simplicial complex called nerve which records which subfamilies of the good
cover intersect. A simplicial complex is topologically d-representable if it is
isomorphic to the nerve of a good cover in R^d. We prove that it is
algorithmically undecidable whether a given simplicial complex is topologically
d-representable for any fixed d \geq 5. The result remains also valid if we
replace good covers with acyclic covers or with covers by open d-balls.
As an auxiliary result we prove that if a simplicial complex is PL embeddable
into R^d, then it is topologically d-representable. We also supply this result
with showing that if a "sufficiently fine" subdivision of a k-dimensional
complex is d-representable and k \leq (2d-3)/3, then the complex is PL
embeddable into R^d.Comment: 22 pages, 5 figures; result extended also to acyclic covers in
version
Strong d-collapsibility
We introduce a notion of strong d-collapsibility. Using this notion, we
simplify the proof of Matoušek and the author showing that the nerve of a
family of sets of size at most d is d-collapsible
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