Related papers: Polynomial definability in constraint languages wi…
Let $p$ be a prime. We prove bounds on short Dirichlet character sums evaluated at a class of homogeneous polynomials in arbitrary dimensions. In every dimension, this bound is nontrivial for sums over boxes with side lengths as short as…
The theory of finite term algebras provides a natural framework to describe the semantics of functional languages. The ability to efficiently reason about term algebras is essential to automate program analysis and verification for…
The determinantal complexity of a polynomial $P \in \mathbb{F}[x_1, \ldots, x_n]$ over a field $\mathbb{F}$ is the dimension of the smallest matrix $M$ whose entries are affine functions in $\mathbb{F}[x_1, \ldots, x_n]$ such that $P =…
Regular expressions with backreferences (regex, for short), as supported by most modern libraries for regular expression matching, have an NP-complete matching problem. We define a complexity parameter of regex, called active variable…
In the algebraic theory of codes and formal languages, the set $Q$ of all primitive words over some alphabet $\zi $ has received special interest. With this survey article we give an overview about relevant research to this topic during the…
We introduce a novel logical notion--partial entailment--to propositional logic. In contrast with classical entailment, that a formula P partially entails another formula Q with respect to a background formula set \Gamma intuitively means…
The quantified constraint satisfaction problem (QCSP) is the problem of deciding, given a structure and a first-order prenex sentence whose quantifier-free part is the conjunction of atoms, whether or not the sentence holds on the…
By Fagin's Theorem, NP contains precisely those problems that can be described by formulas starting with an existential second-order quantifier, followed by only first-order quantifiers (ESO formulas). Subsequent research refined this…
We show that for any $i > 0$, it is decidable, given a regular language, whether it is expressible in the $\Sigma_i[<]$ fragment of first-order logic FO[<]. This settles a question open since 1971. Our main technical result relies on the…
We consider the hardness of approximation of optimization problems from the point of view of definability. For many NP-hard optimization problems it is known that, unless P = NP, no polynomial-time algorithm can give an approximate solution…
Concurrent Constraint Programming (CCP) is a simple and powerful model for concurrency where agents interact by telling and asking constraints. Since their inception, CCP-languages have been designed for having a strong connection to logic.…
In Descriptive Complexity, there is a vast amount of literature on decision problems, and their classes such as \textbf{P, NP, L and NL}. ~ However, research on the descriptive complexity of optimisation problems has been limited.…
It is known that the existential theory of equations in free groups is decidable. This is a famous result of Makanin. On the other hand it has been shown that the scheme of his algorithm is not primitive recursive. In this paper we present…
We consider Parikh images of languages accepted by non-deterministic finite automata and context-free grammars; in other words, we treat the languages in a commutative way --- we do not care about the order of letters in the accepted word,…
Let $G$ be a finite group, $p$ a prime and $P$ a Sylow $p$-subgroup of $G$. In this note we give a cohomological criterion for the $p$-solvability of $G$ depending on the cohomology in degree $1$ with coefficients in $\mathbb F_p$ of both…
We show that, for a finitely generated residually finite group $\Gamma$, the word $[x_1, \ldots, x_k]$ is a probabilistic identity of $\Gamma$ if and only if $\Gamma$ is virtually nilpotent of class less than $k$. Related results,…
Let G be a finite p-solvable group and P a Sylow p-subgroup of G. Suppose that $\gamma_{l(p-1)}(P)\subseteq \gamma_r(P)^{p^s}$ for $l(p-1)<r+s(p-1)$, then the p-length is bounded by a function depending on l.
We prove first-order definability of the prime subring inside polynomial rings, whose coefficient rings are (commutative unital) reduced and indecomposable. This is achieved by means of a uniform formula in the language of rings with…
Valued constraint satisfaction problems (VCSPs) are a large class of combinatorial optimisation problems. It is desirable to classify the computational complexity of VCSPs depending on a fixed set of allowed cost functions in the input.…
We consider the problem of evaluating certain exponential sums. These sums take the form $\sum_{x_1,...,x_n \in Z_N} e^{f(x_1,...,x_n) {2 \pi i / N}} $, where each x_i is summed over a ring Z_N, and f(x_1,...,x_n) is a multivariate…