Decreasing Diagrams for Confluence and Commutation

Like termination, confluence is a central property of rewrite systems. Unlike for termination, however, there exists no known complexity hierarchy for confluence. In this paper we investigate whether the decreasing diagrams technique can be used to obtain such a hierarchy. The decreasing diagrams technique is one of the strongest and most versatile methods for proving confluence of abstract rewrite systems. It is complete for countable systems, and it has many well-known confluence criteria as corollaries. So what makes decreasing diagrams so powerful? In contrast to other confluence techniques, decreasing diagrams employ a labelling of the steps with labels from a well-founded order in order to conclude confluence of the underlying unlabelled relation. Hence it is natural to ask how the size of the label set influences the strength of the technique. In particular, what class of abstract rewrite systems can be proven confluent using decreasing diagrams restricted to 1 label, 2 labels, 3 labels, and so on? Surprisingly, we find that two labels suffice for proving confluence for every abstract rewrite system having the cofinality property, thus in particular for every confluent, countable system. Secondly, we show that this result stands in sharp contrast to the situation for commutation of rewrite relations, where the hierarchy does not collapse. Thirdly, investigating the possibility of a confluence hierarchy, we determine the first-order (non-)definability of the notion of confluence and related properties, using techniques from finite model theory. We find that in particular Hanf's theorem is fruitful for elegant proofs of undefinability of properties of abstract rewrite systems

On Einstein Algebras and Relativistic Spacetimes

In this paper, we examine the relationship between general relativity and the theory of Einstein algebras. We show that according to a formal criterion for theoretical equivalence recently proposed by Halvorson (2012, 2015) and Weatherall (2015), the two are equivalent theories.Comment: 20 page

Adding modular predicates to first-order fragments

We investigate the decidability of the definability problem for fragments of first order logic over finite words enriched with modular predicates. Our approach aims toward the most generic statements that we could achieve, which successfully covers the quantifier alternation hierarchy of first order logic and some of its fragments. We obtain that deciding this problem for each level of the alternation hierarchy of both first order logic and its two-variable fragment when equipped with all regular numerical predicates is not harder than deciding it for the corresponding level equipped with only the linear order and the successor. For two-variable fragments we also treat the case of the signature containing only the order and modular predicates.Relying on some recent results, this proves the decidability for each level of the alternation hierarchy of the two-variable first order fragmentwhile in the case of the first order logic the question remains open for levels greater than two.The main ingredients of the proofs are syntactic transformations of first order formulas as well as the algebraic framework of finite categories

FO-Definability of Shrub-Depth

Shrub-depth is a graph invariant often considered as an extension of tree-depth to dense graphs. We show that the model-checking problem of monadic second-order logic on a class of graphs of bounded shrub-depth can be decided by AC^0-circuits after a precomputation on the formula. This generalizes a similar result on graphs of bounded tree-depth [Y. Chen and J. Flum, 2018]. At the core of our proof is the definability in first-order logic of tree-models for graphs of bounded shrub-depth

On the injectivity of the Leibniz operator

The class of weakly algebrizable logics is defined as the class of logics having monotonic and injective Leibniz operator. We show that \monotonicity" can- not be discarded on this definition, by presenting an example of a system with injective and non monotonic Leibniz operator. We also show that the non injectivity of the non protoalgebraic inf-sup fragment of the Classic Propositional Calculus, CPC_{inf,sup}, holds only from the fact that the empty set is a CPC_{inf,sup}-filter.FCT via UIM