English

Definability equals recognizability for graphs of bounded treewidth

Logic in Computer Science 2016-05-11 v1 Computational Complexity Discrete Mathematics Data Structures and Algorithms Formal Languages and Automata Theory

Abstract

We prove a conjecture of Courcelle, which states that a graph property is definable in MSO with modular counting predicates on graphs of constant treewidth if, and only if it is recognizable in the following sense: constant-width tree decompositions of graphs satisfying the property can be recognized by tree automata. While the forward implication is a classic fact known as Courcelle's theorem, the converse direction remained open

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1605.03045,
  title  = {Definability equals recognizability for graphs of bounded treewidth},
  author = {Mikołaj Bojańczyk and Michał Pilipczuk},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1605.03045},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

21 pages, an extended abstract will appear in the proceedings of LICS 2016

R2 v1 2026-06-22T13:57:34.254Z