Abstract
We present in this paper Ehrenfeucht-Fraïssé games for the transitive closure logics DTC, TC and ATC. Although the existence of such games for logics with generalized quantifiers was known before, the exact formulation of these games for the predicate transformers arising from various transitive-closure-like operations is new. The games are sound and complete both for finite and infinite models. Combined with well known theorems of Fagin and Immerman these games shed new light on a model theoretic interpretation of the separability of the complexity classes L, NL, P and NP. We discuss this perspective in detail with two examples CLIQUE and HAMILTONIAN by showing that considered as ordered graphs neither of these is definable in monadic second order logic, and hence also not in any transitive closure logic where the predicate transformers are restricted to binary relations.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
M. Ajtai and R. Fagin. Reachability is harder for directed than for undirected finite graphs. Journal of Symbolic Logic, 55.1:113–150, 1990.
J. Barwise and S. Feferman, editors. Model-Theoretic Logics. Perspectives in Mathematical Logic. Springer Verlag, 1985.
Y. Bargury and J.A. Makowsky. The expressive power of transitive closure and 2-way multihead automata. to appear in CSL'91, 1991.
A. Caló. The expressive power of transitive closure. M.Sc. Thesis, Faculty of Computer Science, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel, 1989.
B. Courcelle. The monadic second-order theory of graphs VI: On several representations of graphs by logical structures to appear in Discrete and Applied Mathematics.
M. de Rougemont. Second-order and inductive definability on finite structures. Zeitschrift für mathematische Logik und Grundlagen der Mathematik, 33:47–63, 1987.
H.D. Ebbinghaus, J. Flum, and W. Thomas. Mathematical Logic. Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics. Springer-Verlag, 1980.
R. Fagin. Generalized first-order spectra and polynomial time recognizable sets. In R. Karp, editor, Complexity of Computation, pages 27–41. American Mathematical Society Proc, 7, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, 1974.
R. Fagin. Probabilities on finite models. Journal of Symbolic Logic, 41.1:50–58, 1976.
J. Flum. On bounded theories. to appear in CSL'91, 1991.
Haim Gaifman. On local and non-local properties. In J. Stern, editor, Logic Colloquium '81, pages 105–135. North-Holland publishing Company, 1982.
D. Gabbay, A. Pnueli, S. Shelah, and J. Stavi. On temporal analysis of fairness. In Proceedings of the 7th ACM-POPL, pages 163–173, 1980.
J. E. Hopcroft and J. D. Ullman. Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages and Computation. Addison-Wesley Series in Computer Science. Addison-Wesley, 1980.
N. Immerman. Languages that capture complexity classes. SIAM Journal on Computing, 16(4):760–778, Aug 1987. Also appeared as a preliminary report in Proceedings of the 15th Annual ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing.
N. Immerman. Nondeterministic space is closed under complement. SIAM Journal on Computing, 17:935–938, 1988.
R.E. Ladner. Apllication of model theoretic games to discrete linera orders and finite automata. Information and Control, 33:281–303, 1977.
J.A. Makowsky. The impact of model theory on theoretical computer science. To appear in the Proceedings of the 9th International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, Uppsala 1991, 1992.
J.A. Makowsky. Model theory and computer science: An appetizer. To appear in the Handbook of Logic in Computer Science, S. Abramski, D. Gabbay and T. Maibaum eds., Oxford University Press, 1992.
J.A. Makowsky and D. Mundici. Abstract equivalence relations. In Model-Theoretic Logics, Perspectives in Mathematical Logic, chapter 19. Springer Verlag, 1985.
J. A. Makowsky and M. Ziegler. Topological model theory with an interior operator: Consistency properties and back and forth arguments. Archiv für mathematische Logik und Grundlagenforschung, 20:37–54, 1980.
Enshao Shen. Manuscript. unpublished, Department of Mathematics, University of Freiburg, Germany, 1991.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1992 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Calò, A., Makowsky, J.A. (1992). The Ehrenfeucht-Fraïssé games for transitive closure. In: Nerode, A., Taitslin, M. (eds) Logical Foundations of Computer Science — Tver '92. LFCS 1992. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 620. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0023863
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0023863
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-55707-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-47276-6
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive