English

Wreath Products of Distributive Forest Algebras

Formal Languages and Automata Theory 2019-11-12 v1

Abstract

It is an open problem whether definability in Propositional Dynamic Logic (PDL) on forests is decidable. Based on an algebraic characterization by Boja\'nczyk, et. al.,(2012) in terms of forest algebras, Straubing (2013) described an approach to PDL based on a k-fold iterated distributive law. A proof that all languages satisfying such a k-fold iterated distributive law are in PDL would settle decidability of PDL. We solve this problem in the case k=2: All languages recognized by forest algebras satisfying a 2-fold iterated distributive law are in PDL. Furthermore, we show that this class is decidable. This provides a novel nontrivial decidable subclass of PDL, and demonstrates the viability of the proposed approach to deciding PDL in general.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1911.03493,
  title  = {Wreath Products of Distributive Forest Algebras},
  author = {Michael Hahn and Andreas Krebs and Howard Straubing},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1911.03493},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

Appeared in: LICS '18 Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM/IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science, pages 512-520