1,706 research outputs found
On Spatial Conjunction as Second-Order Logic
Spatial conjunction is a powerful construct for reasoning about dynamically
allocated data structures, as well as concurrent, distributed and mobile
computation. While researchers have identified many uses of spatial
conjunction, its precise expressive power compared to traditional logical
constructs was not previously known. In this paper we establish the expressive
power of spatial conjunction. We construct an embedding from first-order logic
with spatial conjunction into second-order logic, and more surprisingly, an
embedding from full second order logic into first-order logic with spatial
conjunction. These embeddings show that the satisfiability of formulas in
first-order logic with spatial conjunction is equivalent to the satisfiability
of formulas in second-order logic. These results explain the great expressive
power of spatial conjunction and can be used to show that adding unrestricted
spatial conjunction to a decidable logic leads to an undecidable logic. As one
example, we show that adding unrestricted spatial conjunction to two-variable
logic leads to undecidability. On the side of decidability, the embedding into
second-order logic immediately implies the decidability of first-order logic
with a form of spatial conjunction over trees. The embedding into spatial
conjunction also has useful consequences: because a restricted form of spatial
conjunction in two-variable logic preserves decidability, we obtain that a
correspondingly restricted form of second-order quantification in two-variable
logic is decidable. The resulting language generalizes the first-order theory
of boolean algebra over sets and is useful in reasoning about the contents of
data structures in object-oriented languages.Comment: 16 page
A Logic of Reachable Patterns in Linked Data-Structures
We define a new decidable logic for expressing and checking invariants of
programs that manipulate dynamically-allocated objects via pointers and
destructive pointer updates. The main feature of this logic is the ability to
limit the neighborhood of a node that is reachable via a regular expression
from a designated node. The logic is closed under boolean operations
(entailment, negation) and has a finite model property. The key technical
result is the proof of decidability. We show how to express precondition,
postconditions, and loop invariants for some interesting programs. It is also
possible to express properties such as disjointness of data-structures, and
low-level heap mutations. Moreover, our logic can express properties of
arbitrary data-structures and of an arbitrary number of pointer fields. The
latter provides a way to naturally specify postconditions that relate the
fields on entry to a procedure to the fields on exit. Therefore, it is possible
to use the logic to automatically prove partial correctness of programs
performing low-level heap mutations
Decidability of the interval temporal logic ABBar over the natural numbers
In this paper, we focus our attention on the interval temporal logic of the
Allen's relations "meets", "begins", and "begun by" (ABBar for short),
interpreted over natural numbers. We first introduce the logic and we show that
it is expressive enough to model distinctive interval properties,such as
accomplishment conditions, to capture basic modalities of point-based temporal
logic, such as the until operator, and to encode relevant metric constraints.
Then, we prove that the satisfiability problem for ABBar over natural numbers
is decidable by providing a small model theorem based on an original
contraction method. Finally, we prove the EXPSPACE-completeness of the proble
Temporalized logics and automata for time granularity
Suitable extensions of the monadic second-order theory of k successors have
been proposed in the literature to capture the notion of time granularity. In
this paper, we provide the monadic second-order theories of downward unbounded
layered structures, which are infinitely refinable structures consisting of a
coarsest domain and an infinite number of finer and finer domains, and of
upward unbounded layered structures, which consist of a finest domain and an
infinite number of coarser and coarser domains, with expressively complete and
elementarily decidable temporal logic counterparts.
We obtain such a result in two steps. First, we define a new class of
combined automata, called temporalized automata, which can be proved to be the
automata-theoretic counterpart of temporalized logics, and show that relevant
properties, such as closure under Boolean operations, decidability, and
expressive equivalence with respect to temporal logics, transfer from component
automata to temporalized ones. Then, we exploit the correspondence between
temporalized logics and automata to reduce the task of finding the temporal
logic counterparts of the given theories of time granularity to the easier one
of finding temporalized automata counterparts of them.Comment: Journal: Theory and Practice of Logic Programming Journal Acronym:
TPLP Category: Paper for Special Issue (Verification and Computational Logic)
Submitted: 18 March 2002, revised: 14 Januari 2003, accepted: 5 September
200
Queries with Guarded Negation (full version)
A well-established and fundamental insight in database theory is that
negation (also known as complementation) tends to make queries difficult to
process and difficult to reason about. Many basic problems are decidable and
admit practical algorithms in the case of unions of conjunctive queries, but
become difficult or even undecidable when queries are allowed to contain
negation. Inspired by recent results in finite model theory, we consider a
restricted form of negation, guarded negation. We introduce a fragment of SQL,
called GN-SQL, as well as a fragment of Datalog with stratified negation,
called GN-Datalog, that allow only guarded negation, and we show that these
query languages are computationally well behaved, in terms of testing query
containment, query evaluation, open-world query answering, and boundedness.
GN-SQL and GN-Datalog subsume a number of well known query languages and
constraint languages, such as unions of conjunctive queries, monadic Datalog,
and frontier-guarded tgds. In addition, an analysis of standard benchmark
workloads shows that most usage of negation in SQL in practice is guarded
negation
An Application of the Feferman-Vaught Theorem to Automata and Logics for<br> Words over an Infinite Alphabet
We show that a special case of the Feferman-Vaught composition theorem gives
rise to a natural notion of automata for finite words over an infinite
alphabet, with good closure and decidability properties, as well as several
logical characterizations. We also consider a slight extension of the
Feferman-Vaught formalism which allows to express more relations between
component values (such as equality), and prove related decidability results.
From this result we get new classes of decidable logics for words over an
infinite alphabet.Comment: 24 page
Advances and applications of automata on words and trees : executive summary
Seminar: 10501 - Advances and Applications of Automata on Words and Trees. The aim of the seminar was to discuss and systematize the recent fast progress in automata theory and to identify important directions for future research. For this, the seminar brought together more than 40 researchers from automata theory and related fields of applications. We had 19 talks of 30 minutes and 5 one-hour lectures leaving ample room for discussions. In the following we describe the topics in more detail
Advances and applications of automata on words and trees : abstracts collection
From 12.12.2010 to 17.12.2010, the Dagstuhl Seminar 10501 "Advances and Applications of Automata on Words and Trees" was held in Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz Center for Informatics. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available
Satisfiability for relation-changing logics
Relation-changing modal logics (RC for short) are extensions of the basic modal logic with dynamic operators that modify the accessibility relation of a model during the evaluation of a formula. These languages are equipped with dynamic modalities that are able e.g. to delete, add and swap edges in the model, both locally and globally. We study the satisfiability problem for some of these logics.We first show that they can be translated into hybrid logic. As a result, we can transfer some results from hybrid logics to RC. We discuss in particular decidability for some fragments. We then show that satisfiability is, in general, undecidable for all the languages introduced, via translations from memory logics.Fil: Areces, Carlos Eduardo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Matemática, Astronomía y Física. Sección Ciencias de la Computación; ArgentinaFil: Fervari, Raul Alberto. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Matemática, Astronomía y Física. Sección Ciencias de la Computación; ArgentinaFil: Hoffmann, Guillaume Emmanuel. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Matemática, Astronomía y Física. Sección Ciencias de la Computación; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Martel, Mauricio. Universitat Bremen; Alemani
ATLsc with partial observation
Alternating-time temporal logic with strategy contexts (ATLsc) is a powerful
formalism for expressing properties of multi-agent systems: it extends CTL with
strategy quantifiers, offering a convenient way of expressing both
collaboration and antagonism between several agents. Incomplete observation of
the state space is a desirable feature in such a framework, but it quickly
leads to undecidable verification problems. In this paper, we prove that
uniform incomplete observation (where all players have the same observation)
preserves decidability of the model-checking problem, even for very expressive
logics such as ATLsc.Comment: In Proceedings GandALF 2015, arXiv:1509.0685
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