English

There is no classification of the decidably presentable structures

Logic 2017-02-23 v1

Abstract

A computable structure A\mathcal{A} is decidable if, given a formula φ(xˉ)\varphi(\bar{x}) of elementary first-order logic, and a tuple aˉA\bar{a} \in \mathcal{A}, we have a decision procedure to decide whether φ\varphi holds of aˉ\bar{a}. We show that there is no reasonable classification of the decidably presentable structures. Formally, we show that the index set of the computable structures with decidable presentations is Σ11\Sigma^1_1-complete. This result holds even if we restrict out attention to groups, graphs, or fields. We also show that the index sets of the computable structures with nn-decidable presentations is Σ11\Sigma^1_1-complete for any nn.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1702.06587,
  title  = {There is no classification of the decidably presentable structures},
  author = {Matthew Harrison-Trainor},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1702.06587},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

26 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-22T18:24:41.500Z