English

Boolean dimension and tree-width

Combinatorics 2019-12-12 v5 Data Structures and Algorithms

Abstract

The dimension is a key measure of complexity of partially ordered sets. Small dimension allows succinct encoding. Indeed if PP has dimension dd, then to know whether xyx \leq y in PP it is enough to check whether xyx\leq y in each of the dd linear extensions of a witnessing realizer. Focusing on the encoding aspect Ne\v{s}et\v{r}il and Pudl\'{a}k defined a more expressive version of dimension. A poset PP has boolean dimension at most dd if it is possible to decide whether xyx \leq y in PP by looking at the relative position of xx and yy in only dd permutations of the elements of PP. We prove that posets with cover graphs of bounded tree-width have bounded boolean dimension. This stays in contrast with the fact that there are posets with cover graphs of tree-width three and arbitrarily large dimension. This result might be a step towards a resolution of the long-standing open problem: Do planar posets have bounded boolean dimension?

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1707.06114,
  title  = {Boolean dimension and tree-width},
  author = {Stefan Felsner and Tamás Mészáros and Piotr Micek},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.06114},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

one more reference added; paper revised along the suggestion of three reviewers