2,908 research outputs found
Canonical Abstract Syntax Trees
This paper presents Gom, a language for describing abstract syntax trees and
generating a Java implementation for those trees. Gom includes features
allowing the user to specify and modify the interface of the data structure.
These features provide in particular the capability to maintain the internal
representation of data in canonical form with respect to a rewrite system. This
explicitly guarantees that the client program only manipulates normal forms for
this rewrite system, a feature which is only implicitly used in many
implementations
Logic Meets Algebra: the Case of Regular Languages
The study of finite automata and regular languages is a privileged meeting
point of algebra and logic. Since the work of Buchi, regular languages have
been classified according to their descriptive complexity, i.e. the type of
logical formalism required to define them. The algebraic point of view on
automata is an essential complement of this classification: by providing
alternative, algebraic characterizations for the classes, it often yields the
only opportunity for the design of algorithms that decide expressibility in
some logical fragment.
We survey the existing results relating the expressibility of regular
languages in logical fragments of MSO[S] with algebraic properties of their
minimal automata. In particular, we show that many of the best known results in
this area share the same underlying mechanics and rely on a very strong
relation between logical substitutions and block-products of pseudovarieties of
monoid. We also explain the impact of these connections on circuit complexity
theory.Comment: 37 page
Subjects, Models, Languages, Transformations
Discussions about model-driven approaches tend to be hampered by terminological confusion. This is at least partially caused by a lack of formal precision in defining the basic concepts, including that of "model" and "thing being modelled" - which we call subject in this paper. We propose a minimal criterion that a model should fulfill: essentially, it should come equipped with a clear and unambiguous membership test; in other words, a notion of which subjects it models. We then go on to discuss a certain class of models of models that we call languages, which apart from defining their own membership test also determine membership of their members. Finally, we introduce transformations on each of these layers: a subject transformation is essentially a pair of subjects, a model transformation is both a pair of models and a model of pairs (namely, subject transformations), and a language transformation is both a pair of languages and a language of model transformations. We argue that our framework has the benefits of formal precision (there can be no doubt about whether something satifies our criteria for being a model, a language or a transformation) and minimality (it is hard to imagine a case of modelling or transformation not having the characterstics that we propose)
Fragments of first-order logic over infinite words
We give topological and algebraic characterizations as well as language
theoretic descriptions of the following subclasses of first-order logic FO[<]
for omega-languages: Sigma_2, FO^2, the intersection of FO^2 and Sigma_2, and
Delta_2 (and by duality Pi_2 and the intersection of FO^2 and Pi_2). These
descriptions extend the respective results for finite words. In particular, we
relate the above fragments to language classes of certain (unambiguous)
polynomials. An immediate consequence is the decidability of the membership
problem of these classes, but this was shown before by Wilke and Bojanczyk and
is therefore not our main focus. The paper is about the interplay of algebraic,
topological, and language theoretic properties.Comment: Conference version presented at 26th International Symposium on
Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science, STACS 200
Kolmogorov Complexity in perspective. Part II: Classification, Information Processing and Duality
We survey diverse approaches to the notion of information: from Shannon
entropy to Kolmogorov complexity. Two of the main applications of Kolmogorov
complexity are presented: randomness and classification. The survey is divided
in two parts published in a same volume. Part II is dedicated to the relation
between logic and information system, within the scope of Kolmogorov
algorithmic information theory. We present a recent application of Kolmogorov
complexity: classification using compression, an idea with provocative
implementation by authors such as Bennett, Vitanyi and Cilibrasi. This stresses
how Kolmogorov complexity, besides being a foundation to randomness, is also
related to classification. Another approach to classification is also
considered: the so-called "Google classification". It uses another original and
attractive idea which is connected to the classification using compression and
to Kolmogorov complexity from a conceptual point of view. We present and unify
these different approaches to classification in terms of Bottom-Up versus
Top-Down operational modes, of which we point the fundamental principles and
the underlying duality. We look at the way these two dual modes are used in
different approaches to information system, particularly the relational model
for database introduced by Codd in the 70's. This allows to point out diverse
forms of a fundamental duality. These operational modes are also reinterpreted
in the context of the comprehension schema of axiomatic set theory ZF. This
leads us to develop how Kolmogorov's complexity is linked to intensionality,
abstraction, classification and information system.Comment: 43 page
On the Perturbation of Self-Organized Urban Street Networks
We investigate urban street networks as a whole within the frameworks of
information physics and statistical physics. Urban street networks are
envisaged as evolving social systems subject to a Boltzmann-mesoscopic entropy
conservation. For self-organized urban street networks, our paradigm has
already allowed us to recover the effectively observed scale-free distribution
of roads and to foresee the distribution of junctions. The entropy conservation
is interpreted as the conservation of the surprisal of the city-dwellers for
their urban street network. In view to extend our investigations to other urban
street networks, we consider to perturb our model for self-organized urban
street networks by adding an external surprisal drift. We obtain the statistics
for slightly drifted self-organized urban street networks. Besides being
practical and manageable, this statistics separates the macroscopic evolution
scale parameter from the mesoscopic social parameters. This opens the door to
observational investigations on the universality of the evolution scale
parameter. Ultimately, we argue that the strength of the external surprisal
drift might be an indicator for the disengagement of the city-dwellers for
their city.Comment: 22 pages, 4 figures + 1 table, LaTeX2e+BMCArt+AmSLaTeX+enote
A Combinatorial Approach to Nonlocality and Contextuality
So far, most of the literature on (quantum) contextuality and the
Kochen-Specker theorem seems either to concern particular examples of
contextuality, or be considered as quantum logic. Here, we develop a general
formalism for contextuality scenarios based on the combinatorics of hypergraphs
which significantly refines a similar recent approach by Cabello, Severini and
Winter (CSW). In contrast to CSW, we explicitly include the normalization of
probabilities, which gives us a much finer control over the various sets of
probabilistic models like classical, quantum and generalized probabilistic. In
particular, our framework specializes to (quantum) nonlocality in the case of
Bell scenarios, which arise very naturally from a certain product of
contextuality scenarios due to Foulis and Randall. In the spirit of CSW, we
find close relationships to several graph invariants. The recently proposed
Local Orthogonality principle turns out to be a special case of a general
principle for contextuality scenarios related to the Shannon capacity of
graphs. Our results imply that it is strictly dominated by a low level of the
Navascu\'es-Pironio-Ac\'in hierarchy of semidefinite programs, which we also
apply to contextuality scenarios.
We derive a wealth of results in our framework, many of these relating to
quantum and supraquantum contextuality and nonlocality, and state numerous open
problems. For example, we show that the set of quantum models on a
contextuality scenario can in general not be characterized in terms of a graph
invariant.
In terms of graph theory, our main result is this: there exist two graphs
and with the properties \begin{align*} \alpha(G_1) &= \Theta(G_1),
& \alpha(G_2) &= \vartheta(G_2), \\[6pt] \Theta(G_1\boxtimes G_2) & >
\Theta(G_1)\cdot \Theta(G_2),& \Theta(G_1 + G_2) & > \Theta(G_1) + \Theta(G_2).
\end{align*}Comment: minor revision, same results as in v2, to appear in Comm. Math. Phy
Perspectives for proof unwinding by programming languages techniques
In this chapter, we propose some future directions of work, potentially
beneficial to Mathematics and its foundations, based on the recent import of
methodology from the theory of programming languages into proof theory. This
scientific essay, written for the audience of proof theorists as well as the
working mathematician, is not a survey of the field, but rather a personal view
of the author who hopes that it may inspire future and fellow researchers
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