ASNP: A Tame Fragment of Existential Second-Order Logic

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Contributors

Abstract

Amalgamation SNP (ASNP) is a fragment of existential second-order logic that strictly contains binary connected MMSNP of Feder and Vardi and binary connected guarded monotone SNP of Bienvenu, ten Cate, Lutz, and Wolter; it is a promising candidate for an expressive subclass of NP that exhibits a complexity dichotomy. We show that ASNP has a complexity dichotomy if and only if the infinite-domain dichotomy conjecture holds for constraint satisfaction problems for first-order reducts of binary finitely bounded homogeneous structures. For such CSPs, powerful universal-algebraic hardness conditions are known that are conjectured to describe the border between NP-hard and polynomial-time tractable CSPs. The connection to CSPs also implies that every ASNP sentence can be evaluated in polynomial time on classes of finite structures of bounded treewidth. We show that the syntax of ASNP is decidable. The proof relies on the fact that for classes of finite binary structures given by finitely many forbidden substructures, the amalgamation property is decidable.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationBeyond the Horizon of Computability - 16th Conference on Computability in Europe, CiE 2020, Proceedings
EditorsMarcella Anselmo, Gianluca Della Vedova, Florin Manea, Arno Pauly
PublisherSpringer, Berlin [u. a.]
Pages149-162
Number of pages14
ISBN (print)9783030514655
Publication statusPublished - 2020
Peer-reviewedYes

Publication series

SeriesLecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 12098
ISSN0302-9743

Conference

Title16th Conference on Computability in Europe, CiE 2020
Duration29 June - 3 July 2020
CityFisciano
CountryItaly

External IDs

ORCID /0000-0001-8228-3611/work/142241062

Keywords