Making proofs without Modus Ponens: An introduction to the combinatorics and complexity of cut elimination

This paper is intended to provide an introduction to cut elimination which is accessible to a broad mathematical audience. Gentzen's cut elimination theorem is not as well known as it deserves to be, and it is tied to a lot of interesting mathematical structure. In particular we try to indicate some dynamical and combinatorial aspects of cut elimination, as well as its connections to complexity theory. We discuss two concrete examples where one can see the structure of short proofs with cuts, one concerning feasible numbers and the other concerning "bounded mean oscillation" from real analysis

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

Proof-graphs for Minimal Implicational Logic

It is well-known that the size of propositional classical proofs can be huge. Proof theoretical studies discovered exponential gaps between normal or cut free proofs and their respective non-normal proofs. The aim of this work is to study how to reduce the weight of propositional deductions. We present the formalism of proof-graphs for purely implicational logic, which are graphs of a specific shape that are intended to capture the logical structure of a deduction. The advantage of this formalism is that formulas can be shared in the reduced proof. In the present paper we give a precise definition of proof-graphs for the minimal implicational logic, together with a normalization procedure for these proof-graphs. In contrast to standard tree-like formalisms, our normalization does not increase the number of nodes, when applied to the corresponding minimal proof-graph representations.Comment: In Proceedings DCM 2013, arXiv:1403.768

Expansion Trees with Cut

Herbrand's theorem is one of the most fundamental insights in logic. From the syntactic point of view it suggests a compact representation of proofs in classical first- and higher-order logic by recording the information which instances have been chosen for which quantifiers, known in the literature as expansion trees. Such a representation is inherently analytic and hence corresponds to a cut-free sequent calculus proof. Recently several extensions of such proof representations to proofs with cut have been proposed. These extensions are based on graphical formalisms similar to proof nets and are limited to prenex formulas. In this paper we present a new approach that directly extends expansion trees by cuts and covers also non-prenex formulas. We describe a cut-elimination procedure for our expansion trees with cut that is based on the natural reduction steps. We prove that it is weakly normalizing using methods from the epsilon-calculus

An Instantiation-Based Approach for Solving Quantified Linear Arithmetic

This paper presents a framework to derive instantiation-based decision procedures for satisfiability of quantified formulas in first-order theories, including its correctness, implementation, and evaluation. Using this framework we derive decision procedures for linear real arithmetic (LRA) and linear integer arithmetic (LIA) formulas with one quantifier alternation. Our procedure can be integrated into the solving architecture used by typical SMT solvers. Experimental results on standardized benchmarks from model checking, static analysis, and synthesis show that our implementation of the procedure in the SMT solver CVC4 outperforms existing tools for quantified linear arithmetic

Propositional Logics Complexity and the Sub-Formula Property

In 1979 Richard Statman proved, using proof-theory, that the purely implicational fragment of Intuitionistic Logic (M-imply) is PSPACE-complete. He showed a polynomially bounded translation from full Intuitionistic Propositional Logic into its implicational fragment. By the PSPACE-completeness of S4, proved by Ladner, and the Goedel translation from S4 into Intuitionistic Logic, the PSPACE- completeness of M-imply is drawn. The sub-formula principle for a deductive system for a logic L states that whenever F1,...,Fk proves A, there is a proof in which each formula occurrence is either a sub-formula of A or of some of Fi. In this work we extend Statman result and show that any propositional (possibly modal) structural logic satisfying a particular formulation of the sub-formula principle is in PSPACE. If the logic includes the minimal purely implicational logic then it is PSPACE-complete. As a consequence, EXPTIME-complete propositional logics, such as PDL and the common-knowledge epistemic logic with at least 2 agents satisfy this particular sub-formula principle, if and only if, PSPACE=EXPTIME. We also show how our technique can be used to prove that any finitely many-valued logic has the set of its tautologies in PSPACE.Comment: In Proceedings DCM 2014, arXiv:1504.0192