License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)
When quoting this document, please refer to the following
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2023.111
URN: urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-181632
URL: http://dagstuhl.sunsite.rwth-aachen.de/volltexte/2023/18163/
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Bednarczyk, Bartosz ; Kojelis, Daumantas ; Pratt-Hartmann, Ian

On the Limits of Decision: the Adjacent Fragment of First-Order Logic

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Abstract

We define the adjacent fragment AF of first-order logic, obtained by restricting the sequences of variables occurring as arguments in atomic formulas. The adjacent fragment generalizes (after a routine renaming) two-variable logic as well as the fluted fragment. We show that the adjacent fragment has the finite model property, and that its satisfiability problem is no harder than for the fluted fragment (and hence is Tower-complete). We further show that any relaxation of the adjacency condition on the allowed order of variables in argument sequences yields a logic whose satisfiability and finite satisfiability problems are undecidable. Finally, we study the effect of the adjacency requirement on the well-known guarded fragment (GF) of first-order logic. We show that the satisfiability problem for the guarded adjacent fragment (GA) remains 2ExpTime-hard, thus strengthening the known lower bound for GF.

BibTeX - Entry

@InProceedings{bednarczyk_et_al:LIPIcs.ICALP.2023.111,
  author =	{Bednarczyk, Bartosz and Kojelis, Daumantas and Pratt-Hartmann, Ian},
  title =	{{On the Limits of Decision: the Adjacent Fragment of First-Order Logic}},
  booktitle =	{50th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2023)},
  pages =	{111:1--111:21},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-278-5},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2023},
  volume =	{261},
  editor =	{Etessami, Kousha and Feige, Uriel and Puppis, Gabriele},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2023/18163},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-181632},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2023.111},
  annote =	{Keywords: decidability, satisfiability, variable-ordered logics, complexity}
}

Keywords: decidability, satisfiability, variable-ordered logics, complexity
Collection: 50th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2023)
Issue Date: 2023
Date of publication: 05.07.2023

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