We characterise the classes of tournaments with tractable first-order model checking. For every hereditary class of tournaments T, first-order model checking either is fixed parameter tractable, or is AW[*]-hard. This dichotomy coincides with the fact that T has either bounded or unbounded twin-width, and that the growth of T is either at most exponential or at least factorial. From the model-theoretic point of view, we show that NIP classes of tournaments coincide with bounded twin-width. Twin-width is also characterised by three infinite families of obstructions: T has bounded twin-width if and only if it excludes at least one tournament from each family. This generalises results of Bonnet et al. on ordered graphs. The key for these results is a polynomial time algorithm which takes as input a tournament T and computes a linear order < on V(T) such that the twin-width of the birelation (T, <) is at most some function of the twin-width of T. Since approximating twin-width can be done in FPT time for an ordered structure (T, <), this provides a FPT approximation of twin-width for tournaments.
@InProceedings{geniet_et_al:LIPIcs.ESA.2023.53, author = {Geniet, Colin and Thomass\'{e}, St\'{e}phan}, title = {{First Order Logic and Twin-Width in Tournaments}}, booktitle = {31st Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 2023)}, pages = {53:1--53:14}, series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)}, ISBN = {978-3-95977-295-2}, ISSN = {1868-8969}, year = {2023}, volume = {274}, editor = {G{\o}rtz, Inge Li and Farach-Colton, Martin and Puglisi, Simon J. and Herman, Grzegorz}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ESA.2023.53}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-187061}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ESA.2023.53}, annote = {Keywords: Tournaments, twin-width, first-order logic, model checking, NIP, small classes} }
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