arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Siddharth Bhaskar.
We give a new characterization of the class of rational string functions from formal language theory using order-preserving interpretations with respect to a very weak monadic programming language. This refines the known characterization of rational functions by order-preserving MSO interpretations.
We exploit a decomposition of graph traversals to give a novel characterization of depth-first and breadth-first traversals as universal constructions. Specifically, we introduce functors from two different categories of edge-ordered directed graphs into two different categories of transitively closed edge-ordered graphs; one defines the lexicographic depth-first traversal and the other the lexicographic breadth-first traversal. We show that each functor factors as a composition of universal constructions, and that the usual presentation of traversals as linear orders on vertices can be recovered with the addition of an inclusion functor. Finally, we raise the question of to what extent we can recover search algorithms from the categorical description of the traversal they compute.
We investigate four model-theoretic tameness properties in the context of least fixed-point logic over a family of finite structures. We find that each of these properties depends only on the elementary (i.e., first-order) limit theory, and we completely determine the valid entailments among them. In contrast to the context of first-order logic on arbitrary structures, the order property and independence property are equivalent in this setting. McColm conjectured that least fixed-point definability collapses to first-order definability exactly when proficiency fails. McColm's conjecture is known to be false in general. However, we show that McColm's conjecture is true for any family of finite structures whose limit theory is model-theoretically tame.
Programming language concepts are used to give some new perspectives on a long-standing open problem: is logspace = ptime ?
We give a novel descriptive-complexity theoretic characterization of L and NL computable queries over finite structures using traversal invariance. We summarize this as (N)L = FO + (breadth-first) traversal-invariance.
We define a new type of "shatter function" for set systems that satisfies a Sauer-Shelah type dichotomy, but whose polynomial-growth case is governed by Shelah's 2-rank instead of VC dimension. We identify the rate of growth of this shatter function, the quantity analogous to VC density, with Shelah's $ω$-rank.
A traversal of a connected graph is a linear ordering of its vertices all of whose initial segments induce connected subgraphs. Traversals, and their refinements such as breadth-first and depth-first traversals, are computed by various graph searching algorithms. We extend the theory of generic search and breadth-first search from finite graphs to wellordered infinite graphs, recovering the notion of "search trees" in this context. We also prove tight upper bounds on the extent to which graph search and breadth-first search can modify the order type of the original graph, as well as characterize the traversals computed by these algorithms as lexicographically minimal.
We give an algorithm A which assigns probabilities to logical sentences. For any simple infinite sequence of sentences whose truth-values appear indistinguishable from a biased coin that outputs "true" with probability p, we have that the sequence of probabilities that A assigns to these sentences converges to p.