Undefinability of Approximation of 2-to-2 Games

Abstract

Recent work by Atserias and Dawar (J. Log. Comp 2019) and Tucker-Foltz (LMCS 2024) has established undefinability results in fixed-point logic with counting (FPC) corresponding to many classical complexity results from the hardness of approximation. In this line of work, NP-hardness results are turned into unconditional FPC undefinability results. We extend this work by showing the FPC undefinability of any constant factor approximation of weighted 2-to-2 games, based on the NP-hardness results of Khot, Minzer and Safra. Our result shows that the completely satisfiable 2-to-2 games are not FPC-separable from those that are not epsilon-satisfiable, for arbitrarily small epsilon. The perfect completeness of our inseparability is an improvement on the complexity result, as the NP-hardness of such a separation is still only conjectured. This perfect completeness enables us to show the FPC undefinability of other problems whose NP-hardness is conjectured. In particular, we are able to show that no FPC formula can separate the 3-colourable graphs from those that are not t-colourable, for any constant t.