Search results for "First-Order logic"
showing 10 items of 22 documents
Forcing for First-Order Languages from the Perspective of Rasiowa–Sikorski Lemma
2017
The paper is concerned with the problem of building models for first-order languages from the perspective of the classic paper of Rasiowa and Sikorski [9]. The central idea, developed in this paper, consists in constructing first-order models from individual variables. The key notion of a Rasiowa–Sikorski set of formulas for an arbitrary countable language L is examined. Each Rasiowa–Sikorski set defines a countable model for L . Conversely, every countable model for L is determined by a Rasiowa–Sikorski set. The focus is on constructing Rasiowa–Sikorski sets by applying forcing techniques restricted to Boolean algebras arising from the subsets of the set of atomic formulas of L .
On Inductive Generalization in Monadic First-Order Logic With Identity
1966
Publisher Summary The chapter examines the results obtained by means of a system when the relation of identity is used in addition to monadic predicates. The chapter compares the new system of inductive logic sketched by Jaakko Hintikka with Carnap's system. The main advantage of Hintikka's system is that it gives natural degrees of confirmation to inductive generalizations, whereas Carnap's confirmation function c * enables one to deal satisfactorily with singular inductive inference only. According to Carnap's system, general sentences that are not logically true receive nonnegligible degrees of confirmation only if the evidence contains a large part of the individuals in the whole univer…
A simple proof of the polylog counting ability of first-order logic
2007
The counting ability of weak formalisms (e.g., determining the number of 1's in a string of length N ) is of interest as a measure of their expressive power, and also resorts to complexity-theoretic motivations: the more we can count the closer we get to real computing power. The question was investigated in several papers in complexity theory and in weak arithmetic around 1985. In each case, the considered formalism (AC 0 -circuits, first-order logic, Δ 0 ) was shown to be able to count up to a polylogarithmic number. An essential part of the proofs is the construction of a 1-1 mapping from a small subset of {0, ..., N - 1} into a small initial segment. In each case the expressibility of …
FO^2 with one transitive relation is decidable
2013
We show that the satisfiability problem for the two-variable first-order logic, FO^2, over transitive structures when only one relation is required to be transitive, is decidable. The result is optimal, as FO^2 over structures with two transitive relations, or with one transitive and one equivalence relation, are known to be undecidable, so in fact, our result completes the classification of FO^2-logics over transitive structures with respect to decidability. We show that the satisfiability problem is in 2-NExpTime. Decidability of the finite satisfiability problem remains open.
First-order expressibility of languages with neutral letters or: The Crane Beach conjecture
2005
A language L over an alphabet A is said to have a neutral letter if there is a letter [email protected]?A such that inserting or deleting e's from any word in A^* does not change its membership or non-membership in L. The presence of a neutral letter affects the definability of a language in first-order logic. It was conjectured that it renders all numerical predicates apart from the order predicate useless, i.e., that if a language L with a neutral letter is not definable in first-order logic with linear order, then it is not definable in first-order logic with any set N of numerical predicates. Named after the location of its first, flawed, proof this conjecture is called the Crane Beach …
On the Power of Tree-Walking Automata
2000
Tree-walking automata (TWAs) recently received new attention in the fields of formal languages and databases. Towards a better understanding of their expressiveness, we characterize them in terms of transitive closure logic formulas in normal form. It is conjectured by Engelfriet and Hoogeboom that TWAs cannot define all regular tree languages, or equivalently, all of monadic second-order logic. We prove this conjecture for a restricted, but powerful, class of TWAs. In particular, we show that 1-bounded TWAs, that is TWAs that are only allowed to traverse every edge of the input tree at most once in every direction, cannot define all regular languages. We then extend this result to a class …
Nondeterministic operations on finite relational structures
1998
Abstract This article builds on a tutorial introduction to universal algebra for language theory (Courcelle, Theoret. Comput. Sci. 163 (1996) 1–54) and extends it in two directions. First, nondeterministic operations are considered, i.e., operations which give a set of results instead of a single one. Most of their properties concerning recognizability and equational definability carry over from the ordinary case with minor modifications. Second, inductive sets of evaluations are studied in greater detail. It seems that they are handled most naturally in the framework presented here. We consider the analogues of top-down and bottom-up tree transducers. Again, most of their closure propertie…
Locality of order-invariant first-order formulas
2000
A query is local if the decision of whether a tuple in a structure satisfies this query only depends on a small neighborhood of the tuple. We prove that all queries expressible by order-invariant first-order formulas are local.
Two-Variable First-Order Logic with Equivalence Closure
2012
We consider the satisfiability and finite satisfiability problems for extensions of the two-variable fragment of first-order logic in which an equivalence closure operator can be applied to a fixed number of binary predicates. We show that the satisfiability problem for two-variable, first-order logic with equivalence closure applied to two binary predicates is in 2-NExpTime, and we obtain a matching lower bound by showing that the satisfiability problem for two-variable first-order logic in the presence of two equivalence relations is 2-NExpTime-hard. The logics in question lack the finite model property; however, we show that the same complexity bounds hold for the corresponding finite sa…
Finite Model Reasoning in Expressive Fragments of First-Order Logic
2017
Over the past two decades several fragments of first-order logic have been identified and shown to have good computational and algorithmic properties, to a great extent as a result of appropriately describing the image of the standard translation of modal logic to first-order logic. This applies most notably to the guarded fragment, where quantifiers are appropriately relativized by atoms, and the fragment defined by restricting the number of variables to two. The aim of this talk is to review recent work concerning these fragments and their popular extensions. When presenting the material special attention is given to decision procedures for the finite satisfiability problems, as many of t…