Epistemic Foundation of Stable Model Semantics

Stable model semantics has become a very popular approach for the management of negation in logic programming. This approach relies mainly on the closed world assumption to complete the available knowledge and its formulation has its basis in the so-called Gelfond-Lifschitz transformation. The primary goal of this work is to present an alternative and epistemic-based characterization of stable model semantics, to the Gelfond-Lifschitz transformation. In particular, we show that stable model semantics can be defined entirely as an extension of the Kripke-Kleene semantics. Indeed, we show that the closed world assumption can be seen as an additional source of `falsehood' to be added cumulatively to the Kripke-Kleene semantics. Our approach is purely algebraic and can abstract from the particular formalism of choice as it is based on monotone operators (under the knowledge order) over bilattices only.Comment: 41 pages. To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP

Blow up and Blur constructions in Algebraic Logic

The idea in the title is to blow up a finite structure, replacing each 'colour or atom' by infinitely many, using blurs to represent the resulting term algebra, but the blurs are not enough to blur the structure of the finite structure in the complex algebra. Then, the latter cannot be representable due to a {finite- infinite} contradiction. This structure can be a finite clique in a graph or a finite relation algebra or a finite cylindric algebra. This theme gives examples of weakly representable atom structures that are not strongly representable. Many constructions existing in the literature are placed in a rigorous way in such a framework, properly defined. This is the essence too of construction of Monk like-algebras, one constructs graphs with finite colouring (finitely many blurs), converging to one with infinitely many, so that the original algebra is also blurred at the complex algebra level, and the term algebra is completey representable, yielding a representation of its completion the complex algebra. A reverse of this process exists in the literature, it builds algebras with infinite blurs converging to one with finite blurs. This idea due to Hirsch and Hodkinson, uses probabilistic methods of Erdos to construct a sequence of graphs with infinite chromatic number one that is 2 colourable. This construction, which works for both relation and cylindric algebras, further shows that the class of strongly representable atom structures is not elementary.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1304.114

On theories of random variables

We study theories of spaces of random variables: first, we consider random variables with values in the interval $[0,1]$, then with values in an arbitrary metric structure, generalising Keisler's randomisation of classical structures. We prove preservation and non-preservation results for model theoretic properties under this construction: i) The randomisation of a stable structure is stable. ii) The randomisation of a simple unstable structure is not simple. We also prove that in the randomised structure, every type is a Lascar type

Applying quantitative semantics to higher-order quantum computing

Finding a denotational semantics for higher order quantum computation is a long-standing problem in the semantics of quantum programming languages. Most past approaches to this problem fell short in one way or another, either limiting the language to an unusably small finitary fragment, or giving up important features of quantum physics such as entanglement. In this paper, we propose a denotational semantics for a quantum lambda calculus with recursion and an infinite data type, using constructions from quantitative semantics of linear logic