LIPIcs.ICALP.2023.112.pdf
- Filesize: 0.8 MB
- 18 pages
We investigate expansions of Presburger arithmetic (Pa), i.e., the theory of the integers with addition and order, with additional structure related to exponentiation: either a function that takes a number to the power of 2, or a predicate 2^ℕ for the powers of 2. The latter theory, denoted Pa(2^ℕ(·)), was introduced by Büchi as a first attempt at characterizing the sets of tuples of numbers that can be expressed using finite automata; Büchi’s method does not give an elementary upper bound, and the complexity of this theory has been open. The former theory, denoted as Pa(λx.2^|x|), was shown decidable by Semenov; while the decision procedure for this theory differs radically from the automata-based method proposed by Büchi, Semenov’s method is also non-elementary. And in fact, the theory with the power function has a non-elementary lower bound. In this paper, we show that while Semenov’s and Büchi’s approaches yield non-elementary blow-ups for Pa(2^ℕ(·)), the theory is in fact decidable in triply exponential time, similarly to the best known quantifier-elimination algorithm for Pa. We also provide a NExpTime upper bound for the existential fragment of Pa(λx.2^|x|), a step towards a finer-grained analysis of its complexity. Both these results are established by analyzing a single parameterized satisfiability algorithm for Pa(λx.2^|x|), which can be specialized to either the setting of Pa(2^ℕ(·)) or the existential theory of Pa(λx.2^|x|). Besides the new upper bounds for the existential theory of Pa(λx.2^|x|) and Pa(2^ℕ(·)), we believe our algorithm provides new intuition for the decidability of these theories, and for the features that lead to non-elementary blow-ups.
Feedback for Dagstuhl Publishing