English

Limit laws and automorphism groups of random nonrigid structures

Logic 2016-01-28 v3 Combinatorics

Abstract

A systematic study is made, for an arbitrary finite relational language with at least one symbol of arity at least 2, of classes of nonrigid finite structures. The well known results that almost all finite structures are rigid and that the class of finite structures has a zero-one law are, in the present context, the first layer in a hierarchy of classes of finite structures with increasingly more complex automorphism groups. Such a hierarchy can be defined in more than one way. For example, the kkth level of the hierarchy can consist of all structures having at least kk elements which are moved by some automorphism. Or we can consider, for any finite group GG, all finite structures M\mathcal{M} such that GG is a subgroup of the group of autmorphisms of M\mathcal{M}; in this case the "hierarchy" is a partial order. In both cases, as well as variants of them, each "level" satisfies a logical limit law, but not a zero-one law (unless k=0k = 0 or GG is trivial). Moreover, the number of (labelled or unlabelled) nn-element structures in one place of the hierarchy divided by the number of nn-element structures in another place always converges to a rational number or to \infty as nn \to \infty. All instances of the respective result are proved by an essentially uniform argument.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1305.3097,
  title  = {Limit laws and automorphism groups of random nonrigid structures},
  author = {Ove Ahlman and Vera Koponen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1305.3097},
  year   = {2016}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T00:16:10.838Z