982 research outputs found
Disjunctive form and the modal alternation hierarchy
This paper studies the relationship between disjunctive form, a syntactic
normal form for the modal mu calculus, and the alternation hierarchy. First it
shows that all disjunctive formulas which have equivalent tableau have the same
syntactic alternation depth. However, tableau equivalence only preserves
alternation depth for the disjunctive fragment: there are disjunctive formulas
with arbitrarily high alternation depth that are tableau equivalent to
alternation-free non-disjunctive formulas. Conversely, there are
non-disjunctive formulas of arbitrarily high alternation depth that are tableau
equivalent to disjunctive formulas without alternations. This answers
negatively the so far open question of whether disjunctive form preserves
alternation depth. The classes of formulas studied here illustrate a previously
undocumented type of avoidable syntactic complexity which may contribute to our
understanding of why deciding the alternation hierarchy is still an open
problem.Comment: In Proceedings FICS 2015, arXiv:1509.0282
Fixed-point elimination in the intuitionistic propositional calculus
It is a consequence of existing literature that least and greatest
fixed-points of monotone polynomials on Heyting algebras-that is, the algebraic
models of the Intuitionistic Propositional Calculus-always exist, even when
these algebras are not complete as lattices. The reason is that these extremal
fixed-points are definable by formulas of the IPC. Consequently, the
-calculus based on intuitionistic logic is trivial, every -formula
being equivalent to a fixed-point free formula. We give in this paper an
axiomatization of least and greatest fixed-points of formulas, and an algorithm
to compute a fixed-point free formula equivalent to a given -formula. The
axiomatization of the greatest fixed-point is simple. The axiomatization of the
least fixed-point is more complex, in particular every monotone formula
converges to its least fixed-point by Kleene's iteration in a finite number of
steps, but there is no uniform upper bound on the number of iterations. We
extract, out of the algorithm, upper bounds for such n, depending on the size
of the formula. For some formulas, we show that these upper bounds are
polynomial and optimal
Deciding the First Levels of the Modal mu Alternation Hierarchy by Formula Construction
We construct, for any sentence of the modal mu calculus Psi, derived sentences in the modal fragment and the fragment without least fixpoints of the modal mu calculus such that Psi is equivalent to a formula in these fragments if and only if it is equivalent to these formulas. The formula without greatest fixpoints that Psi is equivalent to if and only if it is equivalent to any formula without greatest fixpoint is obtained by duality. This yields a constructive proof of decidability of the first levels of the modal mu alternation hierarchy. The blow-up incurred by turning Psi into the modal formula is shown to be necessary: there are modal formulas that can be expressed sub-exponentially more efficiently with the use of fixpoints. For the fragments with only greatest or least fixpoints however, as long as formulas are in disjunctive form, the transformation into a formula syntactically in these fragments does not increase the size of the formula
On P-transitive graphs and applications
We introduce a new class of graphs which we call P-transitive graphs, lying
between transitive and 3-transitive graphs. First we show that the analogue of
de Jongh-Sambin Theorem is false for wellfounded P-transitive graphs; then we
show that the mu-calculus fixpoint hierarchy is infinite for P-transitive
graphs. Both results contrast with the case of transitive graphs. We give also
an undecidability result for an enriched mu-calculus on P-transitive graphs.
Finally, we consider a polynomial time reduction from the model checking
problem on arbitrary graphs to the model checking problem on P-transitive
graphs. All these results carry over to 3-transitive graphs.Comment: In Proceedings GandALF 2011, arXiv:1106.081
Fixpoint Alternation: Arithmetic, Transition Systems, and the Binary Tree
We provide an elementary proof of the fixpoint alternationhierarchy in arithmetic, which in turn allows us to simplify the proof of the modal mu-calculus alternation hierarchy. We further show that the alternation hierarchy on the binary tree is strict, resolving a problem of Niwinski
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