Tree canonization and transitive closure

We prove that tree isomorphism is not expressible in the language (FO+TC+COUNT). This is surprising since in the presence of ordering the language captures NL, whereas tree isomorphism and canonization are in L (Lindell, 1992). Our proof uses an Ehrenfeucht-Fraisse game for transitive closure logic with counting. As a corresponding upper bound, we show that tree canonization is expressible in (FO+COUNT)[log n]. The best previous upper bound had been (FO+COUNT)[n ⁰⁽¹⁾] (Dublish and Maheshwari, 1990). The lower bound remains true for bounded-degree trees, and we show that for bounded-degree trees counting is not needed in the upper bound. These results are the first separations of the unordered versions of the logical languages for NL, AC¹, and ThC¹. Our results were motivated by a conjecture in (Etessami and Immerman, 1995) that (FO+TC+COUNT+1LO)=NL, i.e., that a one-way local ordering sufficed to capture NL. We disprove this conjecture, but we prove that a two-way local ordering does suffice, i.e., (FO+TC+COUNT+2LO)=NL