On Algorithms Based on Finitely Many Homomorphism Counts

Abstract

It is well known [Lov\'asz, 67] that up to isomorphism a graph~$G$ is determined by the homomorphism counts $\hom(F, G)$, i.e., the number of homomorphisms from $F$ to $G$, where $F$ ranges over all graphs. Thus, in principle, we can answer any query concerning $G$ with only accessing the $\hom(\cdot,G)$'s instead of $G$ itself. In this paper, we deal with queries for which there is a hom algorithm, i.e., there are finitely many graphs $F_1, \ldots, F_k$ such that for any graph $G$ whether it is a Yes-instance of the query is already determined by the vector\[\overrightarrow{\hom}_{F_1,\ldots,F_k}(G):= \big(\hom(F_1,G),\ldots,\hom(F_k,G)\big),\]where the graphs $F_1, \ldots, F_k$ only depend on $\varphi$. We observe that planarity of graphs and 3-colorability of graphs, properties expressible in monadic second-order logic, have no hom algorithm. On the other hand, queries expressible as a Boolean combination of universal sentences in first-order logic FO have a hom algorithm. Even though it is not easy to find FO definable queries without a hom algorithm, we succeed to show this for the non-existence of an isolated vertex, a property expressible by the FO sentence $\forall x\exists y Exy$, somehow the ``simplest'' graph property not definable by a Boolean combination of universal sentences.These results provide a characterization of the prefix classes of first-order logic with the property that each query definable by a sentence of the prefix class has a hom algorithm. For adaptive query algorithms, i.e., algorithms that again access $\overrightarrow{\hom}_{F_1,\ldots,F_k}(G)$ but here $F_{i+1}$ might depend on $\hom(F_1,G),\ldots,\hom(F_i,G)$, we show that three homomorphism counts $\hom(\cdot,G)$ are both sufficient and in general necessary to determine the isomorphism type of $G$.