Related papers: Finite Model Theory and Proof Complexity revisited…

Choiceless Polynomial Time (CPT) is currently the only candidate logic for capturing PTIME (that is, it is contained in PTIME and has not been separated from it). A prominent example of a decision problem in PTIME that is not known to be…

The search for a logic capturing PTIME is a long standing open problem in finite model theory. One of the most promising candidate logics for this is Choiceless Polynomial Time with counting (CPT). Abstractly speaking, CPT is an…

We extend Choiceless Polynomial Time (CPT), the currently only remaining promising candidate in the quest for a logic capturing PTime, so that this extended logic has the following property: for every class of structures for which…

In the search for a logic capturing polynomial time the most promising candidates are Choiceless Polynomial Time (CPT) and rank logic. Rank logic extends fixed-point logic with counting by a rank operator over prime fields. We show that the…

Choiceless Polynomial Time (CPT) is one of the few remaining candidate logics for capturing PTIME. In this paper, we make progress towards separating CPT from polynomial time by firstly establishing a connection between the expressive power…

We establish new, and surprisingly tight, connections between propositional proof complexity and finite model theory. Specifically, we show that the power of several propositional proof systems, such as Horn resolution, bounded-width…

Turing machines define polynomial time (PTime) on strings but cannot deal with structures like graphs directly, and there is no known, easily computable string encoding of isomorphism classes of structures. Is there a computation model…

We prove a characterization of all polynomial-time computable queries on the class of interval graphs by sentences of fixed-point logic with counting. More precisely, it is shown that on the class of unordered interval graphs, any query is…

This paper is motivated by the question whether there exists a logic capturing polynomial time computation over unordered structures. We consider several algorithmic problems near the border of the known, logically defined complexity…

In this article choiceless polynomial time (CPT) is extended using non-determini\-stic Abstract State Machines (ASMs), which are restricted by three conditions: (1) choice is restricted to choice among atoms; (2) update sets in a state must…

We consider three classification systems for distributed decision tasks: With unbounded computation and certificates, defined by Balliu, D'Angelo, Fraigniaud, and Olivetti [JCSS'18], and with (two flavors of) polynomially bounded local…

Motivated by the quest for a logic for PTIME and recent insights that the descriptive complexity of problems from linear algebra is a crucial aspect of this problem, we study the solvability of linear equation systems over finite groups and…

The central open question in Descriptive Complexity is whether there is a logic that characterizes deterministic polynomial time (PTIME) on relational structures. Towards this goal, we define a logic that is obtained from first-order logic…

In this paper we explore the design of sequent calculi operating on graphs. For this purpose, we introduce a set of logical connectives allowing us to extend the correspondence between cographs and classical propositional formulas to any…

We classify graphs and, more generally, finite relational structures that are identified by C2, that is, two-variable first-order logic with counting. Using this classification, we show that it can be decided in almost linear time whether a…

In the quest for a logic capturing PTime the next natural classes of structures to consider are those with bounded color class size. We present a canonization procedure for graphs with dihedral color classes of bounded size in the logic of…

Recent work has shown that not only decision trees (DTs) may not be interpretable but also proposed a polynomial-time algorithm for computing one PI-explanation of a DT. This paper shows that for a wide range of classifiers, globally…

Motivated by the search for a logic for polynomial time, we study rank logic (FPR) which extends fixed-point logic with counting (FPC) by operators that determine the rank of matrices over finite fields. While FPR can express most of the…

We establish the expressibility in fixed-point logic with counting (FPC) of a number of natural polynomial-time problems. In particular, we show that the size of a maximum matching in a graph is definable in FPC. This settles an open…

The P versus NP problem asks whether every language verifiable in polynomial time can also be decided in deterministic polynomial time. In this paper, we present a constructive proof that P = NP by introducing a universal, graph-based…