Related papers: A Restricted Second-Order Logic for Non-determinis…

Monadic second order logic is the expansion of first order logic by quantifiers ranging over unary relations. We study the shared monadic second order theory of finite linear orders, i.e. the pseudofinite monadic second order theory of…

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…

Courcelle's famous theorem from 1990 states that any property of graphs definable in monadic second-order logic (MSO) can be decided in linear time on any class of graphs of bounded treewidth, or in other words, MSO is fixed-parameter…

It is shown that order-invariance of two-variable first-logic is decidable in the finite. This is an immediate consequence of a decision procedure obtained for the finite satisfiability problem for existential second-order logic with two…

Formalisms based on temporal logics interpreted over finite strict linear orders, known in the literature as finite traces, have been used for temporal specification in automated planning, process modelling, (runtime) verification and…

We study the expressive powers of SO-HORN$^{*}$, SO-HORN$^{r}$ and SO-HORN$^{*r}$ on all finite structures. We show that SO-HORN$^{r}$, SO-HORN$^{*r}$, FO(LFP) coincide with each other and SO-HORN$^{*}$ is proper sublogic of SO-HORN$^{r}$.…

One of Courcelle's celebrated results states that if C is a class of graphs of bounded tree-width, then model-checking for monadic second order logic is fixed-parameter tractable on C by linear time parameterised algorithms. An immediate…

We study probabilistic complexity classes and questions of derandomisation from a logical point of view. For each logic L we introduce a new logic BPL, bounded error probabilistic L, which is defined from L in a similar way as the…

We characterise the sentences in Monadic Second-order Logic (MSO) that are over finite structures equivalent to a Datalog program, in terms of an existential pebble game. We also show that for every class C of finite structures that can be…

We study first-order logic over unordered structures whose elements carry a finite number of data values from an infinite domain which can be compared wrt. equality. As the satisfiability problem for this logic is undecidable in general, in…

Descriptive Complexity has been very successful in characterizing complexity classes of decision problems in terms of the properties definable in some logics. However, descriptive complexity for counting complexity classes, such as FP and…

Second-order transitive-closure logic, SO(TC), is an expressive declarative language that captures the complexity class PSPACE. Already its monadic fragment, MSO(TC), allows the expression of various NP-hard and even PSPACE-hard problems in…

We show that for any $i > 0$, it is decidable, given a regular language, whether it is expressible in the $\Sigma_i[<]$ fragment of first-order logic FO[<]. This settles a question open since 1971. Our main technical result relies on the…

We consider the termination/non-termination property of a class of loops. Such loops are commonly used abstractions of real program pieces. Second-order logic is a convenient language to express non-termination. Of course, such property is…

We show that descriptive complexity's result extends in High Order Logic to capture the expressivity of Turing Machine which have a finite number of alternation and whose time or space is bounded by a finite tower of exponential. Hence we…

We consider the family of guarded and unguarded ordered logics, that constitute a recently rediscovered family of decidable fragments of first-order logic (FO), in which the order of quantification of variables coincides with the order in…

Logical transductions provide a very useful tool to encode classes of structures inside other classes of structures. In this paper we study first-order (FO) transductions and the quasiorder they induce on infinite classes of finite graphs.…

We compare the expressiveness of two extensions of monadic second-order logic (MSO) over the class of finite structures. The first, counting monadic second-order logic (CMSO), extends MSO with first-order modulo-counting quantifiers,…

We study the satisfiability problem for the two-variable first-order logic over structures with one transitive relation. % We show that the problem is decidable in 2-NExpTime for the fragment consisting of formulas where existential…

Algorithmic meta-theorems state that problems definable in a fixed logic can be solved efficiently on structures with certain properties. An example is Courcelle's Theorem, which states that all problems expressible in monadic second-order…