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Asymptotic Theories of Classes Defined by Forbidden Homomorphisms

Combinatorics 2024-06-24 v3 Logic

Abstract

We study the first-order almost-sure theories for classes of finite structures that are specified by homomorphically forbidding a set F\mathcal{F} of finite structures. If F\mathcal{F} consists of undirected graphs, a full description of these theories can be derived from the Kolaitis-Pr\"omel-Rothschild theorem, which treats the special case where F={Kn}\mathcal{F} = \{K_n\}. The corresponding question for finite sets F\mathcal{F} of finite directed graphs is wide open. We present a full description of the almost-sure theories of classes described by homomorphically forbidding finite sets F\mathcal{F} of oriented trees; all of them are ω\omega-categorical. In our proof, we establish a result of independent interest, namely that every constraint satisfaction problem for a finite digraph has first-order convergence, and that the corresponding asymptotic theory can be described as a finite linear combination of ω\omega-categorical theories.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2204.01404,
  title  = {Asymptotic Theories of Classes Defined by Forbidden Homomorphisms},
  author = {Manuel Bodirsky and Colin Jahel},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.01404},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

An error raised by an anonymous referee has been fixed