159 research outputs found
Capturing MSO with One Quantifier
International audienceWe construct a single Lindström quantifier Q such that FO(Q), the extension of first-order logic with Q has the same expressive power as monadic second-order logic on the class of binary trees (with distinct left and right successors) and also on unranked trees with a sibling order. This resolves a conjecture by ten Cate and Segoufin. The quantifier Q is a variation of a quantifier expressing the Boolean satisfiability problem
Order-Invariant MSO is Stronger than Counting MSO in the Finite
We compare the expressiveness of two extensions of monadic second-order logic
(MSO) over the class of finite structures. The first, counting monadic
second-order logic (CMSO), extends MSO with first-order modulo-counting
quantifiers, allowing the expression of queries like ``the number of elements
in the structure is even''. The second extension allows the use of an
additional binary predicate, not contained in the signature of the queried
structure, that must be interpreted as an arbitrary linear order on its
universe, obtaining order-invariant MSO.
While it is straightforward that every CMSO formula can be translated into an
equivalent order-invariant MSO formula, the converse had not yet been settled.
Courcelle showed that for restricted classes of structures both order-invariant
MSO and CMSO are equally expressive, but conjectured that, in general,
order-invariant MSO is stronger than CMSO.
We affirm this conjecture by presenting a class of structures that is
order-invariantly definable in MSO but not definable in CMSO.Comment: Revised version contributed to STACS 200
Monadic second order finite satisfiability and unbounded tree-width
The finite satisfiability problem of monadic second order logic is decidable
only on classes of structures of bounded tree-width by the classic result of
Seese (1991). We prove the following problem is decidable:
Input: (i) A monadic second order logic sentence , and (ii) a
sentence in the two-variable fragment of first order logic extended
with counting quantifiers. The vocabularies of and may
intersect.
Output: Is there a finite structure which satisfies such
that the restriction of the structure to the vocabulary of has bounded
tree-width? (The tree-width of the desired structure is not bounded.)
As a consequence, we prove the decidability of the satisfiability problem by
a finite structure of bounded tree-width of a logic extending monadic second
order logic with linear cardinality constraints of the form
, where the and
are monadic second order variables. We prove the decidability of a similar
extension of WS1S
Meta-Kernelization with Structural Parameters
Meta-kernelization theorems are general results that provide polynomial
kernels for large classes of parameterized problems. The known
meta-kernelization theorems, in particular the results of Bodlaender et al.
(FOCS'09) and of Fomin et al. (FOCS'10), apply to optimization problems
parameterized by solution size. We present the first meta-kernelization
theorems that use a structural parameters of the input and not the solution
size. Let C be a graph class. We define the C-cover number of a graph to be a
the smallest number of modules the vertex set can be partitioned into, such
that each module induces a subgraph that belongs to the class C. We show that
each graph problem that can be expressed in Monadic Second Order (MSO) logic
has a polynomial kernel with a linear number of vertices when parameterized by
the C-cover number for any fixed class C of bounded rank-width (or
equivalently, of bounded clique-width, or bounded Boolean width). Many graph
problems such as Independent Dominating Set, c-Coloring, and c-Domatic Number
are covered by this meta-kernelization result. Our second result applies to MSO
expressible optimization problems, such as Minimum Vertex Cover, Minimum
Dominating Set, and Maximum Clique. We show that these problems admit a
polynomial annotated kernel with a linear number of vertices
First-order definable string transformations
The connection between languages defined by computational models and logic
for languages is well-studied. Monadic second-order logic and finite automata
are shown to closely correspond to each-other for the languages of strings,
trees, and partial-orders. Similar connections are shown for first-order logic
and finite automata with certain aperiodicity restriction. Courcelle in 1994
proposed a way to use logic to define functions over structures where the
output structure is defined using logical formulas interpreted over the input
structure. Engelfriet and Hoogeboom discovered the corresponding "automata
connection" by showing that two-way generalised sequential machines capture the
class of monadic-second order definable transformations. Alur and Cerny further
refined the result by proposing a one-way deterministic transducer model with
string variables---called the streaming string transducers---to capture the
same class of transformations. In this paper we establish a transducer-logic
correspondence for Courcelle's first-order definable string transformations. We
propose a new notion of transition monoid for streaming string transducers that
involves structural properties of both underlying input automata and variable
dependencies. By putting an aperiodicity restriction on the transition monoids,
we define a class of streaming string transducers that captures exactly the
class of first-order definable transformations.Comment: 31 page
An automaton over data words that captures EMSO logic
We develop a general framework for the specification and implementation of
systems whose executions are words, or partial orders, over an infinite
alphabet. As a model of an implementation, we introduce class register
automata, a one-way automata model over words with multiple data values. Our
model combines register automata and class memory automata. It has natural
interpretations. In particular, it captures communicating automata with an
unbounded number of processes, whose semantics can be described as a set of
(dynamic) message sequence charts. On the specification side, we provide a
local existential monadic second-order logic that does not impose any
restriction on the number of variables. We study the realizability problem and
show that every formula from that logic can be effectively, and in elementary
time, translated into an equivalent class register automaton
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