327 research outputs found
Fluted Formulas and the Limits of Decidability
In the predicate calculus, variables provide a flexible indexing service that selects the actual arguments to a predicate letter from among possible arguments that precede the predicate letter (in the parse of the formula). In the process of selection, the possible arguments can be permuted, repeated (used more than once), and skipped. If this service is withheld, so that arguments must be the immediately preceding ones, taken in the order in which they occur, the formula is said to be fluted. Quine showed that if a fluted formula contains only homogeneous conjunction (conjoins only subformulas of equal arity), then the satisfiability of the formula is decidable. It remained an open question whether the satisfiability of a fluted formula without this restriction is decidable. This paper answers that question
An expressive completeness theorem for coalgebraic modal mu-calculi
Generalizing standard monadic second-order logic for Kripke models, we
introduce monadic second-order logic interpreted over coalgebras for an
arbitrary set functor. We then consider invariance under behavioral equivalence
of MSO-formulas. More specifically, we investigate whether the coalgebraic
mu-calculus is the bisimulation-invariant fragment of the monadic second-order
language for a given functor. Using automatatheoretic techniques and building
on recent results by the third author, we show that in order to provide such a
characterization result it suffices to find what we call an adequate uniform
construction for the coalgebraic type functor. As direct applications of this
result we obtain a partly new proof of the Janin-Walukiewicz Theorem for the
modal mu-calculus, avoiding the use of syntactic normal forms, and bisimulation
invariance results for the bag functor (graded modal logic) and all exponential
polynomial functors (including the "game functor"). As a more involved
application, involving additional non-trivial ideas, we also derive a
characterization theorem for the monotone modal mu-calculus, with respect to a
natural monadic second-order language for monotone neighborhood models.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1501.0721
Quine’s Fluted Fragment is Non-elementary
We study the fluted fragment, a decidable fragment of first-order logic with an unbounded number of variables, originally identified by W.V. Quine. We show that the satisfiability problem for this fragment has non-elementary complexity, thus refuting an earlier published claim by W.C. Purdy that it is in NExpTime. More precisely, we consider, for all m greater than 1, the intersection of the fluted fragment and the m-variable fragment of first-order logic. We show that this sub-fragment forces (m/2)-tuply exponentially large models, and that its satisfiability problem is (m/2)-NExpTime-hard. We round off by using a corrected version of Purdy\u27s construction to show that the m-variable fluted fragment has the m-tuply exponential model property, and that its satisfiability problem is in m-NExpTime
Decidability properties for fragments of CHR
We study the decidability of termination for two CHR dialects which,
similarly to the Datalog like languages, are defined by using a signature which
does not allow function symbols (of arity >0). Both languages allow the use of
the = built-in in the body of rules, thus are built on a host language that
supports unification. However each imposes one further restriction. The first
CHR dialect allows only range-restricted rules, that is, it does not allow the
use of variables in the body or in the guard of a rule if they do not appear in
the head. We show that the existence of an infinite computation is decidable
for this dialect. The second dialect instead limits the number of atoms in the
head of rules to one. We prove that in this case, the existence of a
terminating computation is decidable. These results show that both dialects are
strictly less expressive than Turing Machines. It is worth noting that the
language (without function symbols) without these restrictions is as expressive
as Turing Machines
What's Decidable About Sequences?
We present a first-order theory of sequences with integer elements,
Presburger arithmetic, and regular constraints, which can model significant
properties of data structures such as arrays and lists. We give a decision
procedure for the quantifier-free fragment, based on an encoding into the
first-order theory of concatenation; the procedure has PSPACE complexity. The
quantifier-free fragment of the theory of sequences can express properties such
as sortedness and injectivity, as well as Boolean combinations of periodic and
arithmetic facts relating the elements of the sequence and their positions
(e.g., "for all even i's, the element at position i has value i+3 or 2i"). The
resulting expressive power is orthogonal to that of the most expressive
decidable logics for arrays. Some examples demonstrate that the fragment is
also suitable to reason about sequence-manipulating programs within the
standard framework of axiomatic semantics.Comment: Fixed a few lapses in the Mergesort exampl
Monadic Second-Order Logic and Bisimulation Invariance for Coalgebras
Generalizing standard monadic second-order logic for Kripke models, we
introduce monadic second-order logic interpreted over coalgebras for an
arbitrary set functor. Similar to well-known results for monadic second-order
logic over trees, we provide a translation of this logic into a class of
automata, relative to the class of coalgebras that admit a tree-like supporting
Kripke frame. We then consider invariance under behavioral equivalence of
formulas; more in particular, we investigate whether the coalgebraic
mu-calculus is the bisimulation-invariant fragment of monadic second-order
logic. Building on recent results by the third author we show that in order to
provide such a coalgebraic generalization of the Janin-Walukiewicz Theorem, it
suffices to find what we call an adequate uniform construction for the functor.
As applications of this result we obtain a partly new proof of the
Janin-Walukiewicz Theorem, and bisimulation invariance results for the bag
functor (graded modal logic) and all exponential polynomial functors.
Finally, we consider in some detail the monotone neighborhood functor, which
provides coalgebraic semantics for monotone modal logic. It turns out that
there is no adequate uniform construction for this functor, whence the
automata-theoretic approach towards bisimulation invariance does not apply
directly. This problem can be overcome if we consider global bisimulations
between neighborhood models: one of our main technical results provides a
characterization of the monotone modal mu-calculus extended with the global
modalities, as the fragment of monadic second-order logic for the monotone
neighborhood functor that is invariant for global bisimulations
Generic Trace Logics
We combine previous work on coalgebraic logic with the coalgebraic traces
semantics of Hasuo, Jacobs, and Sokolova
The Fluted Fragment with Transitivity
We study the satisfiability problem for the fluted fragment extended with transitive relations. We show that the logic enjoys the finite model property when only one transitive relation is available. On the other hand we show that the satisfiability problem is undecidable already for the two-variable fragment of the logic in the presence of three transitive relations
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