142 research outputs found
On Symmetric Circuits and Fixed-Point Logics
We study properties of relational structures such as graphs that are decided
by families of Boolean circuits. Circuits that decide such properties are
necessarily invariant to permutations of the elements of the input structures.
We focus on families of circuits that are symmetric, i.e., circuits whose
invariance is witnessed by automorphisms of the circuit induced by the
permutation of the input structure. We show that the expressive power of such
families is closely tied to definability in logic. In particular, we show that
the queries defined on structures by uniform families of symmetric Boolean
circuits with majority gates are exactly those definable in fixed-point logic
with counting. This shows that inexpressibility results in the latter logic
lead to lower bounds against polynomial-size families of symmetric circuits.Comment: 22 pages. Full version of a paper to appear in STACS 201
Investigating Logics for Feasible Computation
The most celebrated open problem in theoretical computer science is, undoubtedly, the problem of whether P = NP. This is actually one instance of the many unresolved questions in the area of computational complexity. Many different classes of decision problems have been defined in terms of the resources needed to recognize them on various models of computation, such as deterministic or non-deterministic Turing machines, parallel machines and randomized machines. Most of the non-trivial questions concerning the inter-relationship between these classes remain unresolved. On the other hand, these classes have proved to be robustly defined, not only in that they are closed under natural transformations, but many different characterizations have independently defined the same classes. One such alternative approach is that of descriptive complexity, which seeks to define the complexity, not of computing a problem, but of describing it in a language such as the Predicate Calculus. It is particularly interesting that this approach yields a surprisingly close correspondence to computational complexity classes. This provides a natural characterization of many complexity classes that is not tied to a particular machine model of computation
A Restricted Second Order Logic for Finite Structures
AbstractWe introduce a restricted version of second order logic SOωin which the second order quantifiers range over relations that are closed under the equivalence relation ≡kofkvariable equivalence, for somek. This restricted second order logic is an effective fragment of the infinitary logicLω∞ω, but it differs from other such fragments in that it is not based on a fixed point logic. We explore the relationship of SOωwith fixed point logics, showing that its inclusion relations with these logics are equivalent to problems in complexity theory. We also look at the expressibility of NP-complete problems in this logic
Generalized Quantifiers and Logical Reducibilities
We consider extensions of first order logic (FO) and least fixed point logic (LFP) with generalized quantifiers in the sense of Lindström [Lin66]. We show that adding a finite set of such quantifiers to LFP fails to capture all polynomial time properties of structures, even over a fixed signature. We show that this strengthens results in [Hel92] and [KV92a]. We also consider certain regular infinite sets of Lindström quantifiers, which correspond to a natural notion of logical reducibility. We show that if there is any recursively enumerable set of quantifiers that can be added to FO (or LFP) to capture P, then there is one with strong uniformity conditions. This is established through a general result, linking the existence of complete problems for complexity classes with respect to the first order translations of [Imm87] or the elementary reductions of [LG77] with the existence of recursive index sets for these classes
Finite state verifiers with constant randomness
We give a new characterization of as the class of languages
whose members have certificates that can be verified with small error in
polynomial time by finite state machines that use a constant number of random
bits, as opposed to its conventional description in terms of deterministic
logarithmic-space verifiers. It turns out that allowing two-way interaction
with the prover does not change the class of verifiable languages, and that no
polynomially bounded amount of randomness is useful for constant-memory
computers when used as language recognizers, or public-coin verifiers. A
corollary of our main result is that the class of outcome problems
corresponding to O(log n)-space bounded games of incomplete information where
the universal player is allowed a constant number of moves equals NL.Comment: 17 pages. An improved versio
Two-Variable Logic with Two Order Relations
It is shown that the finite satisfiability problem for two-variable logic
over structures with one total preorder relation, its induced successor
relation, one linear order relation and some further unary relations is
EXPSPACE-complete. Actually, EXPSPACE-completeness already holds for structures
that do not include the induced successor relation. As a special case, the
EXPSPACE upper bound applies to two-variable logic over structures with two
linear orders. A further consequence is that satisfiability of two-variable
logic over data words with a linear order on positions and a linear order and
successor relation on the data is decidable in EXPSPACE. As a complementing
result, it is shown that over structures with two total preorder relations as
well as over structures with one total preorder and two linear order relations,
the finite satisfiability problem for two-variable logic is undecidable
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