3,621 research outputs found
Godel's Incompleteness Phenomenon - Computationally
We argue that Godel's completeness theorem is equivalent to completability of
consistent theories, and Godel's incompleteness theorem is equivalent to the
fact that this completion is not constructive, in the sense that there are some
consistent and recursively enumerable theories which cannot be extended to any
complete and consistent and recursively enumerable theory. Though any
consistent and decidable theory can be extended to a complete and consistent
and decidable theory. Thus deduction and consistency are not decidable in
logic, and an analogue of Rice's Theorem holds for recursively enumerable
theories: all the non-trivial properties of such theories are undecidable
A Note on the Complexity of Restricted Attribute-Value Grammars
The recognition problem for attribute-value grammars (AVGs) was shown to be
undecidable by Johnson in 1988. Therefore, the general form of AVGs is of no
practical use. In this paper we study a very restricted form of AVG, for which
the recognition problem is decidable (though still NP-complete), the R-AVG. We
show that the R-AVG formalism captures all of the context free languages and
more, and introduce a variation on the so-called `off-line parsability
constraint', the `honest parsability constraint', which lets different types of
R-AVG coincide precisely with well-known time complexity classes.Comment: 18 pages, also available by (1) anonymous ftp at
ftp://ftp.fwi.uva.nl/pub/theory/illc/researchReports/CT-95-02.ps.gz ; (2) WWW
from http://www.fwi.uva.nl/~mtrautwe
Consequences of a Goedel's misjudgment
The fundamental aim of the paper is to correct an harmful way to interpret a
Goedel's erroneous remark at the Congress of Koenigsberg in 1930. Despite the
Goedel's fault is rather venial, its misreading has produced and continues to
produce dangerous fruits, as to apply the incompleteness Theorems to the full
second-order Arithmetic and to deduce the semantic incompleteness of its
language by these same Theorems. The first three paragraphs are introductory
and serve to define the languages inherently semantic and its properties, to
discuss the consequences of the expression order used in a language and some
question about the semantic completeness: in particular is highlighted the fact
that a non-formal theory may be semantically complete despite using a language
semantically incomplete. Finally, an alternative interpretation of the Goedel's
unfortunate comment is proposed. KEYWORDS: semantic completeness, syntactic
incompleteness, categoricity, arithmetic, second-order languages, paradoxesComment: English version, 19 pages. Fixed and improved terminolog
Undecidability of Equality in the Free Locally Cartesian Closed Category (Extended version)
We show that a version of Martin-L\"of type theory with an extensional
identity type former I, a unit type N1 , Sigma-types, Pi-types, and a base type
is a free category with families (supporting these type formers) both in a 1-
and a 2-categorical sense. It follows that the underlying category of contexts
is a free locally cartesian closed category in a 2-categorical sense because of
a previously proved biequivalence. We show that equality in this category is
undecidable by reducing it to the undecidability of convertibility in
combinatory logic. Essentially the same construction also shows a slightly
strengthened form of the result that equality in extensional Martin-L\"of type
theory with one universe is undecidable
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