4,707 research outputs found
Elliptic divisibility sequences and undecidable problems about rational points
Julia Robinson has given a first-order definition of the rational integers Z
in the rational numbers Q by a formula (\forall \exists \forall \exists)(F=0)
where the \forall-quantifiers run over a total of 8 variables, and where F is a
polynomial. This implies that the \Sigma_5-theory of Q is undecidable. We prove
that a conjecture about elliptic curves provides an interpretation of Z in Q
with quantifier complexity \forall \exists, involving only one universally
quantified variable. This improves the complexity of defining Z in Q in two
ways, and implies that the \Sigma_3-theory, and even the \Pi_2-theory, of Q is
undecidable (recall that Hilbert's Tenth Problem for Q is the question whether
the \Sigma_1-theory of Q is undecidable).
In short, granting the conjecture, there is a one-parameter family of
hypersurfaces over Q for which one cannot decide whether or not they all have a
rational point.
The conjecture is related to properties of elliptic divisibility sequences on
an elliptic curve and its image under rational 2-descent, namely existence of
primitive divisors in suitable residue classes, and we discuss how to prove
weaker-in-density versions of the conjecture and present some heuristics.Comment: 39 pages, uses calrsfs. 3rd version: many small changes, change of
titl
Quadratic Word Equations with Length Constraints, Counter Systems, and Presburger Arithmetic with Divisibility
Word equations are a crucial element in the theoretical foundation of
constraint solving over strings, which have received a lot of attention in
recent years. A word equation relates two words over string variables and
constants. Its solution amounts to a function mapping variables to constant
strings that equate the left and right hand sides of the equation. While the
problem of solving word equations is decidable, the decidability of the problem
of solving a word equation with a length constraint (i.e., a constraint
relating the lengths of words in the word equation) has remained a
long-standing open problem. In this paper, we focus on the subclass of
quadratic word equations, i.e., in which each variable occurs at most twice. We
first show that the length abstractions of solutions to quadratic word
equations are in general not Presburger-definable. We then describe a class of
counter systems with Presburger transition relations which capture the length
abstraction of a quadratic word equation with regular constraints. We provide
an encoding of the effect of a simple loop of the counter systems in the theory
of existential Presburger Arithmetic with divisibility (PAD). Since PAD is
decidable, we get a decision procedure for quadratic words equations with
length constraints for which the associated counter system is \emph{flat}
(i.e., all nodes belong to at most one cycle). We show a decidability result
(in fact, also an NP algorithm with a PAD oracle) for a recently proposed
NP-complete fragment of word equations called regular-oriented word equations,
together with length constraints. Decidability holds when the constraints are
additionally extended with regular constraints with a 1-weak control structure.Comment: 18 page
Subclasses of Presburger Arithmetic and the Weak EXP Hierarchy
It is shown that for any fixed , the -fragment of
Presburger arithmetic, i.e., its restriction to quantifier alternations
beginning with an existential quantifier, is complete for
, the -th level of the weak EXP
hierarchy, an analogue to the polynomial-time hierarchy residing between
and . This result completes the
computational complexity landscape for Presburger arithmetic, a line of
research which dates back to the seminal work by Fischer & Rabin in 1974.
Moreover, we apply some of the techniques developed in the proof of the lower
bound in order to establish bounds on sets of naturals definable in the
-fragment of Presburger arithmetic: given a -formula
, it is shown that the set of non-negative solutions is an ultimately
periodic set whose period is at most doubly-exponential and that this bound is
tight.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figure
Numerical verification of the Cohen-Lenstra-Martinet heuristics and of Greenberg's -rationality conjecture
In this paper we make a series of numerical experiments to support
Greenberg's -rationality conjecture, we present a family of -rational
biquadratic fields and we find new examples of -rational multiquadratic
fields. In the case of multiquadratic and multicubic fields we show that the
conjecture is a consequence of the Cohen-Lenstra-Martinet heuristic and of the
conjecture of Hofmann and Zhang on the -adic regulator, and we bring new
numerical data to support the extensions of these conjectures. We compare the
known algorithmic tools and propose some improvements
Branching-time model checking of one-counter processes
One-counter processes (OCPs) are pushdown processes which operate only on a
unary stack alphabet. We study the computational complexity of model checking
computation tree logic (CTL) over OCPs. A PSPACE upper bound is inherited from
the modal mu-calculus for this problem. First, we analyze the periodic
behaviour of CTL over OCPs and derive a model checking algorithm whose running
time is exponential only in the number of control locations and a syntactic
notion of the formula that we call leftward until depth. Thus, model checking
fixed OCPs against CTL formulas with a fixed leftward until depth is in P. This
generalizes a result of the first author, Mayr, and To for the expression
complexity of CTL's fragment EF. Second, we prove that already over some fixed
OCP, CTL model checking is PSPACE-hard. Third, we show that there already
exists a fixed CTL formula for which model checking of OCPs is PSPACE-hard. To
obtain the latter result, we employ two results from complexity theory: (i)
Converting a natural number in Chinese remainder presentation into binary
presentation is in logspace-uniform NC^1 and (ii) PSPACE is AC^0-serializable.
We demonstrate that our approach can be used to obtain further results. We show
that model-checking CTL's fragment EF over OCPs is hard for P^NP, thus
establishing a matching lower bound and answering an open question of the first
author, Mayr, and To. We moreover show that the following problem is hard for
PSPACE: Given a one-counter Markov decision process, a set of target states
with counter value zero each, and an initial state, to decide whether the
probability that the initial state will eventually reach one of the target
states is arbitrarily close to 1. This improves a previously known lower bound
for every level of the Boolean hierarchy by Brazdil et al
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