English

On Vaughan Pratt's crossword problem

Combinatorics 2021-10-15 v2 Rings and Algebras

Abstract

Vaughan Pratt has introduced objects consisting of pairs (A,W)(A,W) where AA is a set and WW a set of subsets of A,A, such that (i) WW contains \emptyset and A,A, (ii) if CC is a subset of A×AA\times A such that for every aA,a\in A, both {b(a,b)C}\{b\mid (a,b)\in C\} and {b(b,a)C}\{b\mid (b,a)\in C\} are members of WW (a "crossword" with all "rows" and "columns" in W),W), then {b(b,b)C}\{b\mid (b,b)\in C\} (the "diagonal word") also belongs to W,W, and (iii) for all distinct a,bA,a,b\in A, the set WW has an element which contains aa but not b.b. He has asked whether for every A,A, the only such WW is the set of all subsets of A.A. We answer that question in the negative. We also obtain several positive results, in particular, a positive answer to the above question if WW is closed under complementation. We obtain partial results on whether there can exist counterexamples to Pratt's question with WW countable.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1504.07310,
  title  = {On Vaughan Pratt's crossword problem},
  author = {George M. Bergman and Pace P. Nielsen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1504.07310},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

17 pages. Final version; we have made various minor changes in wording etc

R2 v1 2026-06-22T09:23:51.881Z