Related papers: Regular languages defined by first-order formulas …

In many instances in first order logic or computable algebra, classical theorems show that many problems are undecidable for general structures, but become decidable if some rigidity is imposed on the structure. For example, the set of…

This paper proposes an alternative language for expressing results of the algorithmic theory of randomness. The language is more precise in that it does not involve unspecified additive or multiplicative constants, making mathematical…

We investigate the expressive power of first-order quantifications in the context of monadic second-order logic over pictures. We show that k+1 set quantifier alternations allow to define a picture language that cannot be defined using k…

We relate two measures of complexity of regular languages. The first is syntactic complexity, that is, the cardinality of the syntactic semigroup of the language. That semigroup is isomorphic to the semigroup of transformations of states…

One measure of the complexity of a first-order theory, and similarly a type, is the complexity of the formulas required to axiomatize it. We say a theory is bounded if there is an axiomatization involving only $\forall_n$-formulas for some…

Over finite words, languages of dot-depth one are expressively complete for alternation-free first-order logic. This fragment is also known as the Boolean closure of existential first-order logic. Here, the atomic formulas comprise order,…

We define a model of predicate logic in which every term and predicate, open or closed, has an absolute denotation independently of a valuation of the variables. For each variable a, the domain of the model contains an element [[a]] which…

We prove that a random group, in Gromov's density model with $d < 1/16$ satisfies with overwhelming probability a universal-existential first-order sentence $\sigma$ (in the language of groups) if and only if $\sigma$ is true in a…

In this thesis, we study the place of regular languages within the communication complexity setting. In particular, we are interested in the non-deterministic communication complexity of regular languages. We show that a regular language…

We prove that there is a first-order sentence in the language of rings that is true for all finitely generated fields of characteristic 0 and false for all fields of characteristic >0. We also prove that for each n in N, there is a…

A word $w$ is concise in a class of groups $\mathcal{C}$ if, for every group $G$ in $\mathcal{C}$, the verbal subgroup $w(G)$ is finite whenever $w$ takes only finitely many values in $G$. This notion can be naturally extended to…

We consider first-order logic over the subword ordering on finite words, where each word is available as a constant. Our first result is that the $\Sigma_1$ theory is undecidable (already over two letters). We investigate the decidability…

In classical logic, nonBoolean fluents, such as the location of an object, can be naturally described by functions. However, this is not the case in answer set programs, where the values of functions are pre-defined, and nonmonotonicity of…

Let A be a finite alphabet and let L contained in (A*)^n be an n-variable language over A. We say that L is regular if it is the language accepted by a synchronous n-tape finite state automaton, it is quasi-regular if it is accepted by an…

This paper proposes an extension to classical regular expressions by the addition of two operators allowing the inclusion of boolean formulae from the zeroth order logic. These expressions are called constrained expressions. The associated…

We prove that there are single Henkin quantifiers such that first order logic augmented by one of these quantifiers is undecidable in the empty vocabulary. Examples of such quantifiers are given.

Prefix normal words are binary words that have no factor with more $1$s than the prefix of the same length. Finite prefix normal words were introduced in [Fici and Lipt\'ak, DLT 2011]. In this paper, we study infinite prefix normal words…

Right-linear (or left-linear) grammars are a well-known class of context-free grammars computing just the regular languages. They may naturally be written as expressions with (least) fixed points but with products restricted to letters as…

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 study the class of languages that have membership proofs which can be verified by real-time finite-state machines using only a constant number of random bits, regardless of the size of their inputs. Since any further restriction on the…