4,351 research outputs found
What's Decidable About Sequences?
We present a first-order theory of sequences with integer elements,
Presburger arithmetic, and regular constraints, which can model significant
properties of data structures such as arrays and lists. We give a decision
procedure for the quantifier-free fragment, based on an encoding into the
first-order theory of concatenation; the procedure has PSPACE complexity. The
quantifier-free fragment of the theory of sequences can express properties such
as sortedness and injectivity, as well as Boolean combinations of periodic and
arithmetic facts relating the elements of the sequence and their positions
(e.g., "for all even i's, the element at position i has value i+3 or 2i"). The
resulting expressive power is orthogonal to that of the most expressive
decidable logics for arrays. Some examples demonstrate that the fragment is
also suitable to reason about sequence-manipulating programs within the
standard framework of axiomatic semantics.Comment: Fixed a few lapses in the Mergesort exampl
Decidability in the logic of subsequences and supersequences
We consider first-order logics of sequences ordered by the subsequence
ordering, aka sequence embedding. We show that the \Sigma_2 theory is
undecidable, answering a question left open by Kuske. Regarding fragments with
a bounded number of variables, we show that the FO2 theory is decidable while
the FO3 theory is undecidable
Queries with Guarded Negation (full version)
A well-established and fundamental insight in database theory is that
negation (also known as complementation) tends to make queries difficult to
process and difficult to reason about. Many basic problems are decidable and
admit practical algorithms in the case of unions of conjunctive queries, but
become difficult or even undecidable when queries are allowed to contain
negation. Inspired by recent results in finite model theory, we consider a
restricted form of negation, guarded negation. We introduce a fragment of SQL,
called GN-SQL, as well as a fragment of Datalog with stratified negation,
called GN-Datalog, that allow only guarded negation, and we show that these
query languages are computationally well behaved, in terms of testing query
containment, query evaluation, open-world query answering, and boundedness.
GN-SQL and GN-Datalog subsume a number of well known query languages and
constraint languages, such as unions of conjunctive queries, monadic Datalog,
and frontier-guarded tgds. In addition, an analysis of standard benchmark
workloads shows that most usage of negation in SQL in practice is guarded
negation
A decidable quantified fragment of set theory with ordered pairs and some undecidable extensions
In this paper we address the decision problem for a fragment of set theory
with restricted quantification which extends the language studied in [4] with
pair related quantifiers and constructs, in view of possible applications in
the field of knowledge representation. We will also show that the decision
problem for our language has a non-deterministic exponential time complexity.
However, for the restricted case of formulae whose quantifier prefixes have
length bounded by a constant, the decision problem becomes NP-complete. We also
observe that in spite of such restriction, several useful set-theoretic
constructs, mostly related to maps, are expressible. Finally, we present some
undecidable extensions of our language, involving any of the operators domain,
range, image, and map composition.
[4] Michael Breban, Alfredo Ferro, Eugenio G. Omodeo and Jacob T. Schwartz
(1981): Decision procedures for elementary sublanguages of set theory. II.
Formulas involving restricted quantifiers, together with ordinal, integer, map,
and domain notions. Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics 34, pp.
177-195Comment: In Proceedings GandALF 2012, arXiv:1210.202
Real-time and Probabilistic Temporal Logics: An Overview
Over the last two decades, there has been an extensive study on logical
formalisms for specifying and verifying real-time systems. Temporal logics have
been an important research subject within this direction. Although numerous
logics have been introduced for the formal specification of real-time and
complex systems, an up to date comprehensive analysis of these logics does not
exist in the literature. In this paper we analyse real-time and probabilistic
temporal logics which have been widely used in this field. We extrapolate the
notions of decidability, axiomatizability, expressiveness, model checking, etc.
for each logic analysed. We also provide a comparison of features of the
temporal logics discussed
A Logic of Reachable Patterns in Linked Data-Structures
We define a new decidable logic for expressing and checking invariants of
programs that manipulate dynamically-allocated objects via pointers and
destructive pointer updates. The main feature of this logic is the ability to
limit the neighborhood of a node that is reachable via a regular expression
from a designated node. The logic is closed under boolean operations
(entailment, negation) and has a finite model property. The key technical
result is the proof of decidability. We show how to express precondition,
postconditions, and loop invariants for some interesting programs. It is also
possible to express properties such as disjointness of data-structures, and
low-level heap mutations. Moreover, our logic can express properties of
arbitrary data-structures and of an arbitrary number of pointer fields. The
latter provides a way to naturally specify postconditions that relate the
fields on entry to a procedure to the fields on exit. Therefore, it is possible
to use the logic to automatically prove partial correctness of programs
performing low-level heap mutations
- …