English

The MSO+U theory of (N, <) is undecidable

Logic in Computer Science 2015-02-18 v2

Abstract

We consider the logic MSO+U, which is monadic second-order logic extended with the unbounding quantifier. The unbounding quantifier is used to say that a property of finite sets holds for sets of arbitrarily large size. We prove that the logic is undecidable on infinite words, i.e. the MSO+U theory of (N,<) is undecidable. This settles an open problem about the logic, and improves a previous undecidability result, which used infinite trees and additional axioms from set theory.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1502.04578,
  title  = {The MSO+U theory of (N, <) is undecidable},
  author = {Mikołaj Bojańczyk and Paweł Parys and Szymon Toruńczyk},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1502.04578},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

9 pages, with 2 figures