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BookDOI

The classical decision problem

01 Jan 1997-pp 254-265
TL;DR: The Undecidable Standard Classes for Pure Predicate Logic, a Treatise on the Transformation of the Classical Decision Problem, and some Results and Open Problems are presented.
Abstract: 1. Introduction: The Classical Decision Problem.- 1.1 The Original Problem.- 1.2 The Transformation of the Classical Decision Problem.- 1.3 What Is and What Isn't in this Book.- I. Undecidable Classes.- 2. Reductions.- 2.1 Undecidability and Conservative Reduction.- 2.1.1 The Church-Turing Theorem and Reduction Classes.- 2.1.2 Trakhtenbrot's Theorem and Conservative Reductions.- 2.1.3 Inseparability and Model Complexity.- 2.2 Logic and Complexity.- 2.2.1 Propositional Satisfiability.- 2.2.2 The Spectrum Problem and Fagin's Theorem.- 2.2.3 Capturing Complexity Classes.- 2.2.4 A Decidable Prefix-Vocabulary Class.- 2.3 The Classifiability Problem.- 2.3.1 The Problem.- 2.3.2 Well Partially Ordered Sets.- 2.3.3 The Well Quasi Ordering of Prefix Sets.- 2.3.4 The Well Quasi Ordering of Arity Sequences.- 2.3.5 The Classifiability of Prefix-Vocabulary Sets.- 2.4 Historical Remarks.- 3. Undecidable Standard Classes for Pure Predicate Logic.- 3.1 The Kahr Class.- 3.1.1 Domino Problems.- 3.1.2 Formalization of Domino Problems by $$[\forall \exists \forall , (0,\omega )]$$-Formulae.- 3.1.3 Graph Interpretation of $$[\forall \exists \forall , (0,\omega )]$$-Formulae.- 3.1.4 The Remaining Cases Without $$\exists *$$.- 3.2 Existential Interpretation for $$[{{\forall }^{3}}\exists *, (0,1)]$$.- 3.3 The Gurevich Class.- 3.3.1 The Proof Strategy.- 3.3.2 Reduction to Diagonal-Freeness.- 3.3.3 Reduction to Shift-Reduced Form.- 3.3.4 Reduction toFi-Elimination Form.- 3.3.5 Elimination of MonadicFi.- 3.3.6 The Kostyrko-Genenz and Suranyi Classes.- 3.4 Historical Remarks.- 4. Undecidable Standard Classes with Functions or Equality.- 4.1 Classes with Functions and Equality.- 4.2 Classes with Functions but Without Equality.- 4.3 Classes with Equality but Without Functions: the Goldfarb Classes 161 4.3.1 Formalization of Natural Numbers in $$[{{\forall }^{3}}\exists *, (\omega ,\omega ),(0)]$$=.- 4.3.2 Using Only One Existential Quantifiers.- 4.3.3 Encoding the Non-Auxiliary Binary Predicates.- 4.3.4 Encoding the Auxiliary Binary Predicates of NUM*.- 4.4 Historical Remarks.- 5. Other Undecidable Cases.- 5.1 Krom and Horn Formulae.- 5.1.1 Krom Prefix Classes Without Functions or Equality.- 5.1.2 Krom Prefix Classes with Functions or Equality.- 5.2 Few Atomic Subformulae.- 5.2.1 Few Function and Equality Free Atoms.- 5.2.2 Few Equalities and Inequalities.- 5.2.3 Horn Clause Programs With One Krom Rule.- 5.3 Undecidable Logics with Two Variables.- 5.3.1 First-Order Logic with the Choice Operator.- 5.3.2 Two-Variable Logic with Cardinality Comparison.- 5.4 Conjunctions of Prefix-Vocabulary Classes.- 5.4.1 Reduction to the Case of Conjunctions.- 5.4.2 Another Classifiability Theorem.- 5.4.3 Some Results and Open Problems.- 5.5 Historical Remarks.- II. Decidable Classes and Their Complexity.- 6. Standard Classes with the Finite Model Property.- 6.1 Techniques for Proving Complexity Results.- 6.1.1 Domino Problems Revisited.- 6.1.2 Succinct Descriptions of Inputs.- 6.2 The Classical Solvable Cases.- 6.2.1 Monadic Formulae.- 6.2.2 The Bernays-Schonfinkel-Ramsey Class.- 6.2.3 The Godel-Kalmar-Schutte Class: a Probabilistic Proof.- 6.3 Formulae with One ?.- 6.3.1 A Satisfiability Test for [?*??*, all, all].- 6.3.2 The Ackermann Class.- 6.3.3 The Ackermann Class with Equality.- 6.4 Standard Classes of Modest Complexity.- 6.4.1 The Relational Classes in P, NP and Co-NP.- 6.4.2 Fragments of the Theory of One Unary Function.- 6.4.3 Other Functional Classes.- 6.5 Finite Model Property vs. Infinity Axioms.- 6.6 Historical Remarks.- 7. Monadic Theories and Decidable Standard Classes with Infinity Axioms.- 7.1 Automata, Games and Decidability of Monadic Theories.- 7.1.1 Monadic Theories.- 7.1.2 Automata on Infinite Words and the Monadic Theory of One Successor.- 7.1.3 Tree Automata, Rabin's Theorem and Forgetful De terminacy.- 7.1.4 The Forgetful Determinacy Theorem for Graph Games.- 7.2 The Monadic Second-Order Theory of One Unary Function.- 7.2.1 Decidability Results for One Unary Function.- 7.2.2 The Theory of One Unary Function is not Elementary Recursive.- 7.3 The Shelah Class.- 7.3.1 Algebras with One Unary Operation.- 7.3.2 Canonic Sentences.- 7.3.3 Terminology and Notation.- 7.3.4 1-Satisfiability.- 7.3.5 2-Satisfiability.- 7.3.6 Refinements.- 7.3.7 Villages.- 7.3.8 Contraction.- 7.3.9 Towns.- 7.3.10 The Final Reduction.- 7.4 Historical Remarks.- 8. Other Decidable Cases.- 8.1 First-Order Logic with Two Variables.- 8.2 Unification and Applications to the Decision Problem.- 8.2.1 Unification.- 8.2.2 Herbrand Formulae.- 8.2.3 Positive First-Order Logic.- 8.3 Decidable Classes of Krom Formulae.- 8.3.1 The Chain Criterion.- 8.3.2 The Aanderaa-Lewis Class.- 8.3.3 The Maslov Class.- 8.4 Historical Remarks.- A. Appendix: Tiling Problems.- A.1 Introduction.- A.2 The Origin Constrained Domino Problem.- A.3 Robinson's Aperiodic Tile Set.- A.4 The Unconstrained Domino Problem.- A.5 The Periodic Problem and the Inseparability Result.- Annotated Bibliography.
Citations
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Book
01 Jan 1997
TL;DR: The goal of this book is to provide a textbook which presents the basics ofTree automata and several variants of tree automata which have been devised for applications in the aforementioned domains.
Abstract: CONTENTS 7 Acknowledgments Many people gave substantial suggestions to improve the contents of this book. These are, in alphabetic order, Introduction During the past few years, several of us have been asked many times about references on finite tree automata. On one hand, this is the witness of the liveness of this field. On the other hand, it was difficult to answer. Besides several excellent survey chapters on more specific topics, there is only one monograph devoted to tree automata by Gécseg and Steinby. Unfortunately, it is now impossible to find a copy of it and a lot of work has been done on tree automata since the publication of this book. Actually using tree automata has proved to be a powerful approach to simplify and extend previously known results, and also to find new results. For instance recent works use tree automata for application in abstract interpretation using set constraints, rewriting, automated theorem proving and program verification, databases and XML schema languages. Tree automata have been designed a long time ago in the context of circuit verification. Many famous researchers contributed to this school which was headed by A. Church in the late 50's and the early 60's: B. Trakhtenbrot, Many new ideas came out of this program. For instance the connections between automata and logic. Tree automata also appeared first in this framework, following the work of Doner, Thatcher and Wright. In the 70's many new results were established concerning tree automata, which lose a bit their connections with the applications and were studied for their own. In particular, a problem was the very high complexity of decision procedures for the monadic second order logic. Applications of tree automata to program verification revived in the 80's, after the relative failure of automated deduction in this field. It is possible to verify temporal logic formulas (which are particular Monadic Second Order Formulas) on simpler (small) programs. Automata, and in particular tree automata, also appeared as an approximation of programs on which fully automated tools can be used. New results were obtained connecting properties of programs or type systems or rewrite systems with automata. Our goal is to fill in the existing gap and to provide a textbook which presents the basics of tree automata and several variants of tree automata which have been devised for applications in the aforementioned domains. We shall discuss only finite tree automata, and the …

1,492 citations

Book ChapterDOI
03 Dec 2001
TL;DR: The aim of this paper is to summarize and analyze some results obtained in 2000-2001 about decidable and undecidable fragments of various first-order temporal logics, give some applications in the field of knowledge representation and reasoning, and attract the attention of the 'temporal community' to a number of interesting open problems.
Abstract: The aim of this paper is to summarize and analyze some results obtained in 2000-2001 about decidable and undecidable fragments of various first-order temporal logics, give some applications in the field of knowledge representation and reasoning, and attract the attention of the 'temporal community' to a number of interesting open problems.

960 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article surveys various complexity and expressiveness results on different forms of logic programming, in particular, propositional logic programming and datalog, but it also mentions general logic programming with function symbols.
Abstract: This article surveys various complexity and expressiveness results on different forms of logic programming. The main focus is on decidable forms of logic programming, in particular, propositional logic programming and datalog, but we also mention general logic programming with function symbols. Next to classical results on plain logic programming (pure Horn clause programs), more recent results on various important extensions of logic programming are surveyed. These include logic programming with different forms of negation, disjunctive logic programming, logic programming with equality, and constraint logic programming.

801 citations

Book ChapterDOI
TL;DR: A family of languages intended for representing knowledge and reasoning about metric (and more general distance) spaces and considers, for example, the spaces R × R and N × N with their natural metrics.
Abstract: We introduce a family of languages intended for representing knowledge and reasoning about metric (and more general distance) spaces. While the simplest language can speak only about distances between individual objects and Boolean relations between sets, the more expressive ones are capable of capturing notions such as 'somewhere in (or somewhere out of) the sphere of a certain radius', 'everywhere in a certain ring', etc. The computational complexity of the satisfiability problem for formulas in our languages ranges from NP-completeness to undecidability and depends on the class of distance spaces in which they are interpreted. Besides the class of all metric spaces, we consider, for example, the spaces R × R and N × N with their natural metrics.

713 citations


Cites background from "The classical decision problem"

  • ...To prove this result, we reduce the undecidable N N -tiling problem (see [17, 2] and references therein) to the satis ability problem in K....

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A unique framework is proposed that allows to reestablish and to improve various results concerning memoryless strategies due to Emerson and Jutla, Mostowski, Klarlund and on subsequent improvements of McNaughton.

594 citations

References
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This chapter discusses the application of the diagonal process of the universal computing machine, which automates the calculation of circle and circle-free numbers.
Abstract: 1. Computing machines. 2. Definitions. Automatic machines. Computing machines. Circle and circle-free numbers. Computable sequences and numbers. 3. Examples of computing machines. 4. Abbreviated tables Further examples. 5. Enumeration of computable sequences. 6. The universal computing machine. 7. Detailed description of the universal machine. 8. Application of the diagonal process. Pagina 1 di 38 On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem A. M. ...

7,642 citations

Book
10 Jun 1991
TL;DR: Alonzo Church was a pioneer in the field of mathematical logic, whose contributions to number theory and the theories of algorithms and computability laid the theoretical foundations of computer science.
Abstract: Logic is sometimes called the foundation of mathematics: the logician studies the kinds of reasoning used in the individual steps of a proof. Alonzo Church was a pioneer in the field of mathematical logic, whose contributions to number theory and the theories of algorithms and computability laid the theoretical foundations of computer science. His first Princeton book, "The Calculi of Lambda-Conversion" (1941), established an invaluable tool that computer scientists still use today. Even beyond the accomplishment of that book, however, his second Princeton book, "Introduction to Mathematical Logic," defined its subject for a generation. Originally published in Princeton's Annals of Mathematics Studies series, this book was revised in 1956 and reprinted a third time, in 1996, in the Princeton Landmarks in Mathematics series. Although new results in mathematical logic have been developed and other textbooks have been published, it remains, sixty years later, a basic source for understanding formal logic. Church was one of the principal founders of the Association for Symbolic Logic; he founded the "Journal of Symbolic Logic" in 1936 and remained an editor until 1979 At his death in 1995, Church was still regarded as the greatest mathematical logician in the world.

774 citations


Additional excerpts

  • ...You can nd references in [Ch2]....

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  • ...There were plenty of positive and negative results [Ch2]....

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  • ...Again, references can be found in [Ch2]....

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Book
01 Jan 1979
TL;DR: In this article, the authors provide a unified treatment of the positive results of the decision problem for quantification theory, and delimit the boundary between solvable and unsolvable classes of formulas.
Abstract: Solvable Classes of Quantificational Formulas Burton Dreben and Warren D. Goldfarb, Harvard Univ. Skolem and Herbrand addressed the decision problem by associating with each quantificational formula a set, usually infinite, of quantifier-free formulas. In this book, the authors build on that insight to illuminate the mathematical structures underlying solvability, and provide for the first time a unified treatment of the positive results of the decision problem for quantification theory. The results of this book, together with those of Lewis's Unsolvable Classes of Quantificational Formulas, delimit the boundary between solvable and unsolvable.

172 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
Phokion G. Kolaitis1, Moshe Y. Vardi1
05 Jul 1988
TL;DR: It is established that the 0-1 law holds for the class Sigma /sub 1//sup 1/ (Ackermann) of existential second-order sentences, and it is shown that the associated decision problem is NEXPTIME-complete.
Abstract: Fragments of existential second-order logic are investigated in which the patterns of first order quantifiers are restricted. The focus is on the class Sigma /sub 1//sup 1/ (Ackermann) of existential second-order sentences in which the first-order part belongs to the Ackermann class, i.e. it contains at most one universal first-order quantifier. All properties expressible by Sigma /sub 1//sup 1/ (Ackermann) sentences are NP-computable, and there are natural NP-complete properties, such as satisfiability, that are expressible by such sentences. It is established that the 0-1 law holds for the class Sigma /sub 1//sup 1/ (Ackermann), and it is shown that the associated decision problem is NEXPTIME-complete. It is also shown that the 0-1 law fails for other fragments of existential second-order logic in which first-order part belongs to certain prefix classes with an unsolvable decision problem. >

77 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: It is shown that, for any theory T, the decision problem for any class of prenex T -sentences specified by restrictions reduces to that for the standard classes, and there are finitely many standard classes such that any undecidable standard class contains one of K 1, …, K n.
Abstract: The standard classes of a first-order theory T are certain classes of prenex T -sentences defined by restrictions on prefix, number of monadic, dyadic, etc. predicate variables, and number of monadic, dyadic, etc. operation variables. In [3] it is shown that, for any theory T , (1) the decision problem for any class of prenex T -sentences specified by such restrictions reduces to that for the standard classes, and (2) there are finitely many standard classes K 1 , …, K n such that any undecidable standard class contains one of K 1 , …, K n . These results give direction to the study of the decision problem. Below T is predicate logic with identity and operation variables. The Main Theorem solves the decision problem for the standard classes admitting at least one operation variable.

65 citations