Related papers: A syntactic tool for proving hardness in the Secon…
In this work we continue the syntactic study of completeness that began with the works of Immerman and Medina. In particular, we take a conjecture raised by Medina in his dissertation that says if a conjunction of a second-order and a…
Fagin defined the class $NP$ by the means of Existential Second-Order logic. Feder and Vardi expressed it (up to polynomial equivalence) by special fragments of Existential Second-Order logic (SNP), while the authors used forbidden expanded…
Motivated by the problem of finding finite versions of classical incompleteness theorems, we present some conjectures that go beyond ${\bf NP\neq co NP}$. These conjectures formally connect computational complexity with the difficulty of…
The class of problems complete for NP via first-order reductions is known to be characterized by existential second-order sentences of a fixed form. All such sentences are built around the so-called generalized IS-form of the sentence that…
Many natural optimization problems derived from $\sf NP$ admit bilevel and multilevel extensions in which decisions are made sequentially by multiple players with conflicting objectives, as in interdiction, adversarial selection, and…
Amalgamation SNP (ASNP) is a fragment of existential second-order logic that strictly contains binary connected MMSNP of Feder and Vardi and binary guarded monotone SNP of Bienvenu, ten Cate, Lutz, and Wolter; it is a promising candidate…
Deciding whether a graph can be embedded in a grid using only unit-length edges is NP-complete, even when restricted to binary trees. However, it is not difficult to devise a number of graph classes for which the problem is polynomial, even…
Large complexity classes, like the exponential time hierarchy, received little attention in terms of finding complete problems. In this work a generalization of propositional logic is investigated which fills this gap with the introduction…
Many natural combinatorial problems can be expressed as constraint satisfaction problems. This class of problems is known to be NP-complete in general, but certain restrictions on the form of the constraints can ensure tractability. The…
We systematically investigate the complexity of model checking the existential positive fragment of first-order logic. In particular, for a set of existential positive sentences, we consider model checking where the sentence is restricted…
The primary purpose of this article is to show that a certain natural set of axioms yields a completeness result for continuous first-order logic. In particular, we show that in continuous first-order logic a set of formulae is (completely)…
The logic MMSNP is a restricted fragment of existential second-order logic which allows to express many interesting queries in graph theory and finite model theory. The logic was introduced by Feder and Vardi who showed that every MMSNP…
The finite satisfiability problem of monadic second order logic is decidable only on classes of structures of bounded tree-width by the classic result of Seese (1991). We prove the following problem is decidable: Input: (i) A monadic second…
In the plethora of fragments of Halpern and Shoham's modal logic of time intervals (HS), the logic AB of Allen's relations Meets and Started-by is at a central position. Statements that may be true at certain intervals, but at no…
This paper presents the following results on sets that are complete for NP. 1. If there is a problem in NP that requires exponential time at almost all lengths, then every many-one NP-complete set is complete under length-increasing…
We prove that if the linear-time and polynomial-time hierarchies coincide, then every model of $\Pi_1(\mathbb{N}) + \neg \Omega_1$ has a proper end-extension to a model of $\Pi_1(\mathbb{N})$, and so $\Pi_1(\mathbb{N}) + \neg \Omega_1…
We introduce the completeness problem for Modal Logic and examine its complexity. For a definition of completeness for formulas, given a formula of a modal logic, the completeness problem asks whether the formula is complete for that logic.…
By Fagin's Theorem, NP contains precisely those problems that can be described by formulas starting with an existential second-order quantifier, followed by only first-order quantifiers (ESO formulas). Subsequent research refined this…
Descriptive complexity theory aims at inferring a problem's computational complexity from the syntactic complexity of its description. A cornerstone of this theory is Fagin's Theorem, by which a graph property is expressible in existential…
We introduce syntactic modal operator $\BOX$ for \textit{being a thesis} into first-order logic. This logic is a modern realization of R. Carnap's old ideas on modality, as logical necessity (J. Symb. Logic, 1946) \cite{Ca46}. We place it…