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A class of graphs C is monadically stable if for every unary expansion Ĉ of C, one cannot encode - using first-order transductions - arbitrarily long linear orders in graphs from C. It is known that nowhere dense graph classes are monadically stable; these include classes of bounded maximum degree and classes that exclude a fixed topological minor. On the other hand, monadic stability is a property expressed in purely model-theoretic terms that is also suited for capturing structure in dense graphs. In this work we provide a characterization of monadic stability in terms of the Flipper game: a game on a graph played by Flipper, who in each round can complement the edge relation between any pair of vertex subsets, and Localizer, who in each round is forced to restrict the game to a ball of bounded radius. This is an analog of the Splitter game, which characterizes nowhere dense classes of graphs (Grohe, Kreutzer, and Siebertz, J. ACM '17). We give two different proofs of our main result. The first proof is based on tools borrowed from model theory, and it exposes an additional property of monadically stable graph classes that is close in spirit to definability of types. Also, as a byproduct, we show that monadic stability for graph classes coincides with monadic stability of existential formulas with two free variables, and we provide another combinatorial characterization of monadic stability via forbidden patterns. The second proof relies on the recently introduced notion of flip-flatness (Dreier, Mählmann, Siebertz, and Toruńczyk, arXiv 2206.13765) and provides an efficient algorithm to compute Flipper’s moves in a winning strategy. 

An interpretation is an operation that maps an input graph to an output graph by redefining its edge relation using a first-order formula. This rich framework includes operations such as taking the complement or a fixed power of a graph as (very) special cases. We prove that there is an FPT algorithm for the first-order model checking problem on classes of graphs which are first-order interpretable in classes of graphs with bounded local cliquewidth. Notably, this includes interpretations of planar graphs, and of classes of bounded genus in general. To obtain this result we develop a new tool which works in a very general setting of NIP classes and which we believe can be an important ingredient in obtaining similar results in the future. 

We establish a list of characterizations of bounded twin-width for hereditary classes of totally ordered graphs: as classes of at most exponential growth studied in enumerative combinatorics, as monadically NIP classes studied in model theory, as classes that do not transduce the class of all graphs studied in finite model theory, and as classes for which model checking first-order logic is fixed-parameter tractable studied in algorithmic graph theory. This has several consequences. First, it allows us to show that every hereditary class of ordered graphs either has at most exponential growth, or has at least factorial growth. This settles a question first asked by Balogh, Bollobás, and Morris [Eur. J. Comb. ’06] on the growth of hereditary classes of ordered graphs, generalizing the Stanley-Wilf conjecture/Marcus-Tardos theorem. Second, it gives a fixed-parameter approximation algorithm for twin-width on ordered graphs. Third, it yields a full classification of fixed-parameter tractable first-order model checking on hereditary classes of ordered binary structures. Fourth, it provides a model-theoretic characterization of classes with bounded twin-width. Finally, it settles our small conjecture [SODA ’21] in the case of ordered graphs.