241 research outputs found
The Small-Is-Very-Small Principle
The central result of this paper is the small-is-very-small principle for
restricted sequential theories. The principle says roughly that whenever the
given theory shows that a property has a small witness, i.e. a witness in every
definable cut, then it shows that the property has a very small witness: i.e. a
witness below a given standard number.
We draw various consequences from the central result. For example (in rough
formulations): (i) Every restricted, recursively enumerable sequential theory
has a finitely axiomatized extension that is conservative w.r.t. formulas of
complexity . (ii) Every sequential model has, for any , an extension
that is elementary for formulas of complexity , in which the
intersection of all definable cuts is the natural numbers. (iii) We have
reflection for -sentences with sufficiently small witness in any
consistent restricted theory . (iv) Suppose is recursively enumerable
and sequential. Suppose further that every recursively enumerable and
sequential that locally inteprets , globally interprets . Then,
is mutually globally interpretable with a finitely axiomatized sequential
theory.
The paper contains some careful groundwork developing partial satisfaction
predicates in sequential theories for the complexity measure depth of
quantifier alternations
Variations on a Montagovian theme
What are the objects of knowledge, belief, probability, apriority or analyticity? For at least some of these properties, it seems plausible that the objects are sentences, or sentence-like entities. However, results from mathematical logic indicate that sentential properties are subject to severe formal limitations. After surveying these results, I argue that they are more problematic than often assumed, that they can be avoided by taking the objects of the relevant property to be coarse-grained (“sets of worlds”) propositions, and that all this has little to do with the choice between operators and predicates
On the Hardness of Almost-Sure Termination
This paper considers the computational hardness of computing expected
outcomes and deciding (universal) (positive) almost-sure termination of
probabilistic programs. It is shown that computing lower and upper bounds of
expected outcomes is - and -complete, respectively.
Deciding (universal) almost-sure termination as well as deciding whether the
expected outcome of a program equals a given rational value is shown to be
-complete. Finally, it is shown that deciding (universal) positive
almost-sure termination is -complete (-complete).Comment: MFCS 2015. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1410.722
Existential Definability over the Subword Ordering
We study first-order logic (FO) over the structure consisting of finite words over some alphabet A, together with the (non-contiguous) subword ordering. In terms of decidability of quantifier alternation fragments, this logic is well-understood: If every word is available as a constant, then even the ?? (i.e., existential) fragment is undecidable, already for binary alphabets A.
However, up to now, little is known about the expressiveness of the quantifier alternation fragments: For example, the undecidability proof for the existential fragment relies on Diophantine equations and only shows that recursively enumerable languages over a singleton alphabet (and some auxiliary predicates) are definable.
We show that if |A| ? 3, then a relation is definable in the existential fragment over A with constants if and only if it is recursively enumerable. This implies characterizations for all fragments ?_i: If |A| ? 3, then a relation is definable in ?_i if and only if it belongs to the i-th level of the arithmetical hierarchy. In addition, our result yields an analogous complete description of the ?_i-fragments for i ? 2 of the pure logic, where the words of A^* are not available as constants
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