Related papers: Relating Structure and Power: Comonadic Semantics …
We study first-order as well as infinitary logics extended with quantifiers closed upwards under embeddings. In particular, we show that if a chain of quasi-homogeneous structures is sufficiently long then a given formula of such a logic is…
Ehrenfeucht-Fra\"iss\'e games provide a fundamental method for proving elementary equivalence (and equivalence up to a certain quantifier rank) of relational structures. We investigate the soundness and completeness of this method in the…
The analysis of games played on graph-like structures is of increasing importance due to the prevalence of social networks, both virtual and physical, in our daily life. As well as being relevant in computer science, mathematical analysis…
We define a general framework of partition games for formulating two-player pebble games over finite structures. We show that one particular such game, which we call the invertible-map game, yields a family of polynomial-time approximations…
We present a new Ehrenfeucht-Fraisse game approach to collapse results in database theory and we show that, in principle, this approach suffices to prove every natural generic collapse result. Following this approach we can deal with…
Combinatorial games played between two players, called Spoiler and Duplicator, have often been used to capture syntactic properties of formal logical languages. For instance, the widely used Ehrenfeucht-Fra\"iss\'e (EF) game captures the…
Coopetition refers to simultaneous cooperation and competition among actors who "cooperate to grow the pie and compete to split it up." Modern socio-technical systems are characterized by strategic coopetition in which actors concomitantly…
Truth, consistency and elementary equivalence can all be characterised in terms of games, namely the so-called evaluation game, the model-existence game, and the Ehrenfeucht-Fraisse game. We point out the great affinity of these games to…
The framework of graded semantics uses graded monads to capture behavioural equivalences of varying granularity, for example as found on the linear-time/branching-time spectrum, over general system types. We describe a generic…
Combinatorial Game Theory has also been called `additive game theory', whenever the analysis involves sums of independent game components. Such {\em disjunctive sums} invoke comparison between games, which allows abstract values to be…
We begin by reviewing and proving the basic facts of combinatorial game theory. We then consider scoring games (also known as Milnor games or positional games), focusing on the "fixed-length" games for which all sequences of play terminate…
The main goal of this paper is to settle a conceptual framework for cooperative game theory in which the notion of composition/aggregation of games is the defining structure. This is done via the mathematical theory of algebraic operads: we…
Pursuing a new approach to the study of infinite games in combinatorics, we introduce the categories $\mathbf{Game}_{A}$ and $\mathbf{Game}_{B}$ and improve some classical results concerning topological games related to the duality between…
Fragments of first-order logic over words can often be characterized in terms of finite monoids or finite semigroups. Usually these algebraic descriptions yield decidability of the question whether a given regular language is definable in a…
This paper presents equational-based logics for proving first order properties of programming languages involving effects. We propose two dual inference system patterns that can be instanciated with monads or comonads in order to be used…
Lov\'asz (1967) showed that two finite relational structures A and B are isomorphic if, and only if, the number of homomorphisms from C to A is the same as the number of homomorphisms from C to B for any finite structure C. Soon after,…
We introduce open games as a compositional foundation of economic game theory. A compositional approach potentially allows methods of game theory and theoretical computer science to be applied to large-scale economic models for which…
Simple reference games are of central theoretical and empirical importance in the study of situated language use. Although language provides rich, compositional truth-conditional semantics to facilitate reference, speakers and listeners may…
We study the problem of conjunctive query evaluation relative to a class of queries; this problem is formulated here as the relational homomorphism problem relative to a class of structures A, wherein each instance must be a pair of…
This paper introduces a geometric framework for analyzing power relations in games, independent of their strategic form. We define a canonical preference space where each player's relational stance is a normalized vector. This model…