English

Counting Computations with Formulae: Logical Characterisations of Counting Complexity Classes

Logic in Computer Science 2023-05-17 v4

Abstract

We present quantitative logics with two-step semantics based on the framework of quantitative logics introduced by Arenas et al. (2020) and the two-step semantics defined in the context of weighted logics by Gastin & Monmege (2018). We show that some of the fragments of our logics augmented with a least fixed point operator capture interesting classes of counting problems. Specifically, we answer an open question in the area of descriptive complexity of counting problems by providing logical characterizations of two subclasses of #P, namely SpanL and TotP, that play a significant role in the study of approximable counting problems. Moreover, we define logics that capture FPSPACE and SpanPSPACE, which are counting versions of PSPACE.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2304.10334,
  title  = {Counting Computations with Formulae: Logical Characterisations of Counting Complexity Classes},
  author = {Antonis Achilleos and Aggeliki Chalki},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.10334},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

40 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T10:12:30.465Z