A first-order formula is called primitive positive (pp) if it only admits the use of existential quantifiers and conjunction. Pp-formulas are a central concept in (fixed-template) constraint satisfaction since CSP(Γ) can be viewed as the problem of deciding the primitive positive theory of Γ, and pp-definability captures gadget reductions between CSPs. An important class of tractable constraint languages Γ is characterized by having few subpowers, that is, the number of n-ary relations pp-definable from Γ is bounded by 2^p(n) for some polynomial p(n). In this paper we study a restriction of this property, stating that every pp-definable relation is definable by a pp-formula of polynomial length. We conjecture that the existence of such short definitions is actually equivalent to Γ having few subpowers, and verify this conjecture for a large subclass that, in particular, includes all constraint languages on three-element domains. We furthermore discuss how our conjecture imposes an upper complexity bound of co-NP on the subpower membership problem of algebras with few subpowers.
@InProceedings{bulin_et_al:LIPIcs.MFCS.2023.28, author = {Bul{\'\i}n, Jakub and Kompatscher, Michael}, title = {{Short Definitions in Constraint Languages}}, booktitle = {48th International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (MFCS 2023)}, pages = {28:1--28:15}, series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)}, ISBN = {978-3-95977-292-1}, ISSN = {1868-8969}, year = {2023}, volume = {272}, editor = {Leroux, J\'{e}r\^{o}me and Lombardy, Sylvain and Peleg, David}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.MFCS.2023.28}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-185629}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.MFCS.2023.28}, annote = {Keywords: constraint satisfaction, primitive positive definability, few subpowers, polynomially expressive, relational clone, subpower membership} }
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