The First-Order Theory of Sets with Cardinality Constraints is Decidable

We show that the decidability of the first-order theory of the language that combines Boolean algebras of sets of uninterpreted elements with Presburger arithmetic operations. We thereby disprove a recent conjecture that this theory is undecidable. Our language allows relating the cardinalities of sets to the values of integer variables, and can distinguish finite and infinite sets. We use quantifier elimination to show the decidability and obtain an elementary upper bound on the complexity. Precise program analyses can use our decidability result to verify representation invariants of data structures that use an integer field to represent the number of stored elements.Comment: 18 page

Toward classifying unstable theories

The paper deals with two issues: the existence of universal models of a theory T and related properties when cardinal arithmetic does not give this existence offhand. In the first section we prove that simple theories (e.g., theories without the tree property, a class properly containing the stable theories) behaves ``better'' than theories with the strict order property, by criterion from [Sh:457]. In the second section we introduce properties SOP_n such that the strict order property implies SOP_{n+1}, which implies SOP_n, which in turn implies the tree property. Now SOP_4 already implies non-existence of universal models in cases where earlier the strict order property was needed, and SOP_3 implies maximality in the Keisler order, again improving an earlier result which had used the strict order property

Imaginaries in separably closed valued fields

We show that separably closed valued fields of finite imperfection degree (either with lambda-functions or commuting Hasse derivations) eliminate imaginaries in the geometric language. We then use this classification of interpretable sets to study stably dominated types in those structures. We show that separably closed valued fields of finite imperfection degree are metastable and that the space of stably dominated types is strict pro-definable

A geometric constraint over k-dimensional objects and shapes subject to business rules

This report presents a global constraint that enforces rules written in a language based on arithmetic and first-order logic to hold among a set of objects. In a first step, the rules are rewritten to Quantifier-Free Presburger Arithmetic (QFPA) formulas. Secondly, such formulas are compiled to generators of k-dimensional forbidden sets. Such generators are a generalization of the indexicals of cc(FD). Finally, the forbidden sets generated by such indexicals are aggregated by a sweep-based algorithm and used for filtering. The business rules allow to express a great variety of packing and placement constraints, while admitting efficient and effective filtering of the domain variables of the k-dimensional object, without the need to use spatial data structures. The constraint was used to directly encode the packing knowledge of a major car manufacturer and tested on a set of real packing problems under these rules, as well as on a packing-unpacking problem

Some new results on decidability for elementary algebra and geometry

We carry out a systematic study of decidability for theories of (a) real vector spaces, inner product spaces, and Hilbert spaces and (b) normed spaces, Banach spaces and metric spaces, all formalised using a 2-sorted first-order language. The theories for list (a) turn out to be decidable while the theories for list (b) are not even arithmetical: the theory of 2-dimensional Banach spaces, for example, has the same many-one degree as the set of truths of second-order arithmetic. We find that the purely universal and purely existential fragments of the theory of normed spaces are decidable, as is the AE fragment of the theory of metric spaces. These results are sharp of their type: reductions of Hilbert's 10th problem show that the EA fragments for metric and normed spaces and the AE fragment for normed spaces are all undecidable.Comment: 79 pages, 9 figures. v2: Numerous minor improvements; neater proofs of Theorems 8 and 29; v3: fixed subscripts in proof of Lemma 3