Abstract
A well-known result by Frick and Grohe shows that deciding FO logic on trees involves a parameter dependence that is a tower of exponentials. Though this lower bound is tight for Courcelle’s theorem, it has been evaded by a series of recent meta-theorems for other graph classes. Here we provide some additional non-elementary lower bound results, which are in some senses stronger. Our goal is to explain common traits in these recent meta-theorems and identify barriers to further progress.
More specifically, first, we show that on the class of threshold graphs, and therefore also on any union and complement-closed class, there is no model-checking algorithm with elementary parameter dependence even for FO logic. Second, we show that there is no model-checking algorithm with elementary parameter dependence for MSO logic even restricted to paths (or equivalently to unary strings), unless EXP=NEXP. As a corollary, we resolve an open problem on the complexity of MSO model-checking on graphs of bounded max-leaf number. Finally, we look at MSO on the class of colored trees of depth d. We show that, assuming the ETH, for every fixed d ≥ 1 at least d + 1 levels of exponentiation are necessary for this problem, thus showing that the (d + 1)-fold exponential algorithm recently given by Gajarský and Hliněnỳ is essentially optimal.
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Lampis, M. (2013). Model Checking Lower Bounds for Simple Graphs. In: Fomin, F.V., Freivalds, R., Kwiatkowska, M., Peleg, D. (eds) Automata, Languages, and Programming. ICALP 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7965. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39206-1_57
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39206-1_57
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