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

Authors Bartosz Bednarczyk , Daumantas Kojelis , Ian Pratt-Hartmann

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Author Details

Bartosz Bednarczyk
  • Computational Logic Group, Technische Universität Dresden, Germany
  • Institute of Computer Science, University of Wrocław, Poland
Daumantas Kojelis
  • Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester, UK
Ian Pratt-Hartmann
  • Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester, UK
  • Institute of Computer Science, University of Opole, Poland

Funding

  • Bednarczyk, Bartosz: supported by the ERC Consolidator Grant No. 771779 (https://iccl.inf.tu-dresden.de/web/DeciGUT/en).
  • Pratt-Hartmann, Ian: supported by the NCN grant 2018/31/B/ST6/03662.

Acknowledgements

B. Bednarczyk thanks R. Jaakkola for many inspiring discussions.

Cite AsGet BibTex

Bartosz Bednarczyk, Daumantas Kojelis, and Ian Pratt-Hartmann. On the Limits of Decision: the Adjacent Fragment of First-Order Logic. In 50th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2023). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 261, pp. 111:1-111:21, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2023)
https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2023.111

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.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Finite Model Theory
Keywords
  • decidability
  • satisfiability
  • variable-ordered logics
  • complexity

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