When Darwin met Ianus: dichotomies of expressivity

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Brunar, Johanna, Pinsker, Michael, Schöbi, Moritz
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Brunar, Johanna
Pinsker, Michael
Schöbi, Moritz
author_facet Brunar, Johanna
Pinsker, Michael
Schöbi, Moritz
contents The classifications of temporal and phylogeny constraint languages stand among the most seminal complexity classifications within infinite-domain Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs), yet remain the most mysterious in terms of algorithms and algebraic invariants for the tractable cases. We show that those languages which do not pp-construct EVERYTHING (and thus by the classifications are solvable in polynomial time) have, in fact, very limited expressive power as measured by the graphs and hypergraphs they can pp-interpret. This limitation yields many previously unknown algebraic consequences, while also providing new, uniform proofs for known invariance properties. In particular, we show that such temporal and phylogeny constraint languages admit $4$-ary pseudo-Siggers polymorphisms -- a result that sustains the possibility that the existence of such polymorphisms extends to the much broader context of the Bodirsky-Pinsker conjecture. Although temporal and phylogeny constraint languages appear to follow fundamentally different algorithmic principles, our proofs reveal a common core and proceed along strikingly similar lines.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_04347
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle When Darwin met Ianus: dichotomies of expressivity
Brunar, Johanna
Pinsker, Michael
Schöbi, Moritz
Logic in Computer Science
Logic
Rings and Algebras
The classifications of temporal and phylogeny constraint languages stand among the most seminal complexity classifications within infinite-domain Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs), yet remain the most mysterious in terms of algorithms and algebraic invariants for the tractable cases. We show that those languages which do not pp-construct EVERYTHING (and thus by the classifications are solvable in polynomial time) have, in fact, very limited expressive power as measured by the graphs and hypergraphs they can pp-interpret. This limitation yields many previously unknown algebraic consequences, while also providing new, uniform proofs for known invariance properties. In particular, we show that such temporal and phylogeny constraint languages admit $4$-ary pseudo-Siggers polymorphisms -- a result that sustains the possibility that the existence of such polymorphisms extends to the much broader context of the Bodirsky-Pinsker conjecture. Although temporal and phylogeny constraint languages appear to follow fundamentally different algorithmic principles, our proofs reveal a common core and proceed along strikingly similar lines.
title When Darwin met Ianus: dichotomies of expressivity
topic Logic in Computer Science
Logic
Rings and Algebras
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04347