Martin Grohe Descriptive Complexity , Canonisation , and Definable Graph Structure Theory

Descriptive Complexity, Canonisation, and Denable Graph Structure eory

Choiceless Polynomial Time on Structures with Small Abelian Colour Classes

Choiceless Polynomial Time (CPT) is one of the candidates in the quest for a logic for polynomial time. It is a strict extension of fixed-point logic with counting (FPC) but to date it is unknown whether it expresses all polynomial-time properties of finite structures. We study the CPT-definability of the isomorphism problem for relational structures of bounded colour class size q (for short, q...

Testing Graph Isomorphism in Parallel by Playing a Game

Our starting point is the observation that if graphs in a class C have low descriptive complexity, then the isomorphism problem for C is solvable by a fast parallel algorithm. More precisely, we prove that if every graph in C is definable in a finite-variable first order logic with counting quantifiers within logarithmic quantifier depth, then Graph Isomorphism for C is in TC1 ⊆ NC2. If no coun...

Logic, graphs, and algorithms

Algorithmic meta theorems are algorithmic results that apply to whole families of combinatorial problems, instead of just specific problems. These families are usually defined in terms of logic and graph theory. An archetypal algorithmic meta theorem is Courcelle’s Theorem [9], which states that all graph properties definable in monadic second-order logic can be decided in linear time on graphs...

Definability and Descriptive Complexity on Databases of Bounded Tree-Width

We study the expressive power of various query languages on relational databases of bounded tree-width. Our first theorem says that fixed-point logic with counting captures polynomial time on classes of databases of bounded tree-width. This result should be seen on the background of an important open question of Chandra and Harel [7] asking whether there is a query language capturing polynomial...