The Converse of the Real Orthogonal Holant Theorem

The Holant theorem is a powerful tool for studying the computational complexity of counting problems. Due to the great expressiveness of the Holant framework, a converse to the Holant theorem would itself be a very powerful counting indistinguishability theorem. The most general converse does not hold, but we prove the following, still highly general, version: if any two sets of real-valued signatures are Holant-indistinguishable, then they are equivalent up to an orthogonal transformation. This resolves a partially open conjecture of Xia (2010). Consequences of this theorem include the well-known result that homomorphism counts from all graphs determine a graph up to isomorphism, the classical sufficient condition for simultaneous orthogonal similarity of sets of real matrices, and a combinatorial characterization of simultaneously orthogonally decomposable (odeco) sets of symmetric tensors. 45 pages. This is the TheoretiCS journal version