On the uniform one-dimensional fragment

The uniform one-dimensional fragment of first-order logic, U1, is a recently introduced formalism that extends two-variable logic in a natural way to contexts with relations of all arities. We survey properties of U1 and investigate its relationship to description logics designed to accommodate higher arity relations, with particular attention given to DLR_reg. We also define a description logic version of a variant of U1 and prove a range of new results concerning the expressivity of U1 and related logics

Some Turing-Complete Extensions of First-Order Logic

We introduce a natural Turing-complete extension of first-order logic FO. The extension adds two novel features to FO. The first one of these is the capacity to add new points to models and new tuples to relations. The second one is the possibility of recursive looping when a formula is evaluated using a semantic game. We first define a game-theoretic semantics for the logic and then prove that the expressive power of the logic corresponds in a canonical way to the recognition capacity of Turing machines. Finally, we show how to incorporate generalized quantifiers into the logic and argue for a highly natural connection between oracles and generalized quantifiers.Comment: In Proceedings GandALF 2014, arXiv:1408.556

Infinite Networks, Halting and Local Algorithms

The immediate past has witnessed an increased amount of interest in local algorithms, i.e., constant time distributed algorithms. In a recent survey of the topic (Suomela, ACM Computing Surveys, 2013), it is argued that local algorithms provide a natural framework that could be used in order to theoretically control infinite networks in finite time. We study a comprehensive collection of distributed computing models and prove that if infinite networks are included in the class of structures investigated, then every universally halting distributed algorithm is in fact a local algorithm. To contrast this result, we show that if only finite networks are allowed, then even very weak distributed computing models can define nonlocal algorithms that halt everywhere. The investigations in this article continue the studies in the intersection of logic and distributed computing initiated in (Hella et al., PODC 2012) and (Kuusisto, CSL 2013).Comment: In Proceedings GandALF 2014, arXiv:1408.556

Team Semantics and Recursive Enumerability

It is well known that dependence logic captures the complexity class NP, and it has recently been shown that inclusion logic captures P on ordered models. These results demonstrate that team semantics offers interesting new possibilities for descriptive complexity theory. In order to properly understand the connection between team semantics and descriptive complexity, we introduce an extension D* of dependence logic that can define exactly all recursively enumerable classes of finite models. Thus D* provides an approach to computation alternative to Turing machines. The essential novel feature in D* is an operator that can extend the domain of the considered model by a finite number of fresh elements. Due to the close relationship between generalized quantifiers and oracles, we also investigate generalized quantifiers in team semantics. We show that monotone quantifiers of type (1) can be canonically eliminated from quantifier extensions of first-order logic by introducing corresponding generalized dependence atoms