Related papers: Relating Structure and Power: Extended Version
Combinatorial games are widely used in finite model theory, constraint satisfaction, modal logic and concurrency theory to characterize logical equivalences between structures. In particular, Ehrenfeucht-Fraisse games, pebble games, and…
Game comonads offer a categorical view of a number of model-comparison games central to model theory, such as pebble and Ehrenfeucht-Fra\"iss\'e games. Remarkably, the categories of coalgebras for these comonads capture preservation of…
Pebble games are a powerful tool in the study of finite model theory, constraint satisfaction and database theory. Monads and comonads are basic notions of category theory which are widely used in semantics of computation and in modern…
In this paper, we give an overview of some recent work on applying tools from category theory in finite model theory, descriptive complexity, constraint satisfaction, and combinatorics. The motivations for this work come from Computer…
Game comonads provide a categorical syntax-free approach to finite model theory, and their Eilenberg-Moore coalgebras typically encode important combinatorial parameters of structures. In this paper, we develop a framework whereby the…
A number of model-comparison games central to (finite) model theory, such as pebble and Ehrenfeucht-Fra\"{i}ss\'{e} games, can be captured as comonads on categories of relational structures. In particular, the coalgebras for these comonads…
In previous work, Abramsky, Dawar and Wang (LiCS 2017) and Abramsky and Shah (CSL 2018) have shown how a range of model comparison games which play a central role in finite model theory, including Ehrenfeucht-Fraisse, pebbling, and…
Spoiler-Duplicator games are used in finite model theory to examine the expressive power of logics. Their strategies have recently been reformulated as coKleisli maps of game comonads over relational structures, providing new results in…
Game comonads have brought forth a new approach to studying finite model theory categorically. By representing model comparison games semantically as comonads, they allow important logical and combinatorial properties to be exressed in…
Ehrenfeucht-Fraisse games provide means to characterize elementary equivalence for first-order logic, and by standard translation also for modal logics. We propose a novel generalization of Ehrenfeucht- Fraisse games to hybrid-dynamic…
A categorical approach to study model comparison games in terms of comonads was recently initiated by Abramsky et al. In this work, we analyse games that appear naturally in the context of description logics and supplement them with…
The pebbling comonad, introduced by Abramsky, Dawar and Wang, provides a categorical interpretation for the k-pebble games from finite model theory. The coKleisli category of the pebbling comonad specifies equivalences under different…
The notion of homomorphism indistinguishability offers a combinatorial framework for characterizing equivalence relations of graphs, in particular equivalences in counting logics within finite model theory. That is, for certain graph…
Game comonads provide categorical semantics for comparison games in Finite Model Theory, thus providing an abstract characterisation of logical equivalence for a wide range of logics, each one captured through a specific choice of comonad.…
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…
Game comonads, introduced by Abramsky, Dawar and Wang and developed by Abramsky and Shah, give an interesting categorical semantics to some Spoiler-Duplicator games that are common in finite model theory. In particular they expose…
In recent work, comonads and associated structures have been used to analyse a range of important notions in finite model theory, descriptive complexity and combinatorics. We extend this analysis to Hybrid logic, a widely-studied extension…
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…
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…
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…