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More on Descriptive Complexity of Second-Order HORN Logics
This paper concerns Gradel's question asked in 1992: whether all problems
which are in PTIME and closed under substructures are definable in second-order
HORN logic SO-HORN. We introduce revisions of SO-HORN and DATALOG by adding
first-order universal quantifiers over the second-order atoms in the bodies of
HORN clauses and DATALOG rules. We show that both logics are as expressive as
FO(LFP), the least fixed point logic. We also prove that FO(LFP) can not define
all of the problems that are in PTIME and closed under substructures. As a
corollary, we answer Gradel's question negatively