Undecidable Properties Research Articles

On the Union Closed Fragment of Existential Second-Order Logic and Logics with Team Semantics

We present syntactic characterisations for the union closed fragments of existential second-order logic and of logics with team semantics. Since union closure is a semantical and undecidable property, the normal form we introduce enables the handling and provides a better understanding of this fragment. We also introduce inclusion-exclusion games that turn out to be precisely the corresponding model-checking games. These games are not only interesting in their own right, but they also are a key factor towards building a bridge between the semantic and syntactic fragments. On the level of logics with team semantics we additionally present restrictions of inclusion-exclusion logic to capture the union closed fragment. Moreover, we define a team based atom that when adding it to first-order logic also precisely captures the union closed fragment of existential second-order logic which answers an open question by Galliani and Hella.

A Study on Flexible Manufacturing Systems using Petri Net Reduction

Petrinets are the suitable tool for modeling and analysis of discrete event systems. The effective methods of analyzing the discrete event systems (DES) are exhibited by Petri nets. The entire structure of the system is mathematically expressed using Petrinets and also all the properties are analysed by different methods. The properties of Petrinets are different in various systems, a Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) requires production activities in which raw materials, energy, labour, and equipment are combined together in the modification process for the production of good quality goods.” The word “flexible” explains the capability of the system to relate productively to make changes in the system. These changes can be internal failure of the system or classification problems such as a sample or external changes in the structure of the model as well as demand for the process. The inherent limitations such as undecidable properties, complexity in checking, automatic verification of the modeled system are existing in FMS. This paper explains a study on FMS using Petri net reduction. A PN underlies event structures with casuality and compatibility relations. Partial order methods and reduction methods reduce the complexity of constructing the reachability graph. The determination of PN system through reduction methods in recent years focused by many researchers. The significance of reduction methods are highlighted to execute the faster analysis of a system. Instead of coverability trees and the graphical representation the incidence matrix of the PNs are used for the reduction methods. Reduction methods are used to simplify large scale PNs into “equivalent” smaller nets. Boundedness, liveness, simplification of implicit places, shared resources and elimination of self-loops are checked though equivalent smaller nets. The structure of FMS is preserved.

Fast Query Answering over Existential Rules

Enhancing Datalog with existential quantification gives rise to Datalog ∃ , a powerful knowledge representation language widely used in ontology-based query answering. In this setting, a conjunctive query is evaluated over a Datalog ∃ program consisting of extensional data paired with so-called “existential” rules. Owing to their high expressiveness, such rules make the evaluation of queries undecidable, even when the latter are atomic. Decidable generalizations of Datalog by existential rules have been proposed in the literature (such as weakly acyclic and weakly guarded); but they pay the price of higher computational complexity, hindering the implementation of effective systems. Conversely, the results in this article demonstrate that it is definitely possible to enable fast yet powerful query answering over existential rules that strictly generalize Datalog by ensuring decidability without any complexity overhead. On the theoretical side, we define the class of parsimonious programs that guarantees decidability of atomic queries. We then strengthen this class to strongly parsimonious programs ensuring decidability also for conjunctive queries. Since parsimony is an undecidable property, we single out Shy, an easily recognizable class of strongly parsimonious programs that generalizes Datalog while preserving its complexity even under conjunctive queries. Shy also generalizes the class of linear existential programs, while it is uncomparable to the other main classes ensuring decidability. On the practical side, we exploit our results to implement DLV ∃ , an effective system for query answering over parsimonious existential rules. To assess its efficiency, we carry out an experimental analysis, evaluating DLV ∃ performances for ontology-based query answering on both real-world and synthetic ontologies.

Productive corecursion in logic programming

AbstractLogic Programming is a Turing complete language. As a consequence, designing algorithms that decide termination and non-termination of programs or decide inductive/coinductive soundness of formulae is a challenging task. For example, the existing state-of-the-art algorithms can only semi-decide coinductive soundness of queries in logic programming for regular formulae. Another, less famous, but equally fundamental and important undecidable property is productivity. If a derivation is infinite and coinductively sound, we may ask whether the computed answer it determines actually computes an infinite formula. If it does, the infinite computation is productive. This intuition was first expressed under the name of computations at infinity in the 80s. In modern days of the Internet and stream processing, its importance lies in connection to infinite data structure processing. Recently, an algorithm was presented that semi-decides a weaker property – of productivity of logic programs. A logic program is productive if it can give rise to productive derivations. In this paper, we strengthen these recent results. We propose a method that semi-decides productivity of individual derivations for regular formulae. Thus, we at last give an algorithmic counterpart to the notion of productivity of derivations in logic programming. This is the first algorithmic solution to the problem since it was raised more than 30 years ago. We also present an implementation of this algorithm.

Some undecidable properties of SOS specifications

Several properties of SOS specifications with negative premises, often used to define what it means for a specification to be meaningful, are proved undecidable. This includes the existence of least or unique supported or stable models, and specification completeness.

Undecidability through Fourier series

In computability theory a variety of combinatorial systems are encountered (word problems, production systems) that exhibit undecidability properties. Here we seek such structures in the realm of Analysis, more specifically in the area of Fourier Analysis. The starting point is that sufficiently strongly convergent Fourier series give rise to predicates in the sense of first order predicate calculus by associating to any s-ary Fourier series the predicate “the Fourier coefficient with index (n1,…,ns) is non-zero”. We introduce production systems, viewed as counterparts of the combinatorial ones, that generate all recursively enumerable predicates in this way using as tools only elementary operations and functions from classical Analysis. The problem arises how simple such a system may be. It turns out that there is a connection between this question and an as yet unproved conjecture by R. Büchi. This is discussed in the second half of the paper.

The stability of the deterministic Skorokhod problem is undecidable

The Skorokhod problem arises in studying reflected Brownian motion (RBM) and the associated fluid model on the non-negative orthant. This problem specifically arises in the context of queueing networks in the heavy traffic regime. One of the key problems is that of determining, for a given deterministic Skorokhod problem, whether for every initial condition all solutions of the problem staring from the initial condition are attracted to the origin. The conditions for this attraction property, called stability, are known in dimension up to three, but not for general dimensions. In this paper we explain the fundamental difficulties encountered in trying to establish stability conditions for general dimensions. We prove the existence of dimension \(d_0\) such that stability of the Skorokhod problem associated with a fluid model of an RBM in dimension \(d\ge d_0\) is an undecidable property, when the starting state is a part of the input. Namely, there does not exist an algorithm (a constructive procedure) for identifying stable Skorokhod problem in dimensions \(d\ge d_0\).

On invariant checking

Checking whether a given formula is an invariant at a given program location (especially, inside a loop) can be quite nontrivial even for simple loop programs, given that it is in general an undecidable property. This is especially the case if the given formula is not an inductive loop invariant, as most automated techniques can only check or generate inductive loop invariants. In this paper, conditions are identified on simple loops and formulas when this check can be performed automatically. A general theorem is proved which gives a necessary and sufficient condition for a formula to be an invariant under certain restrictions on a loop. As a byproduct of this analysis, a new kind of loop invariant inside the loop body, called inside-loop invariant, is proposed. Such an invariant is more general than an inductive loop invariant typically used in the Floyd-Hoare axiomatic approach to program verification. The use of such invariants for program debugging is explored; it is shown that such invariants can be more useful than traditional inductive loop invariants especially when one is interested in checking extreme/side conditions such as underflow, accessing array/collection data structures outside the range, divide by zero, etc.

Synthesis of sup-interpretations: A survey

In this paper, we survey the complexity of distinct methods that allow the programmer to synthesize a sup-interpretation, a function providing an upper-bound on the size of the output values computed by a program. It consists in a static space analysis tool without consideration of the time consumption. Although clearly related, sup-interpretation is independent from termination since it only provides an upper bound on the terminating computations. First, we study some undecidable properties of sup-interpretations from a theoretical point of view. Next, we fix term rewriting systems as our computational model and we show that a sup-interpretation can be obtained through the use of a well-known termination technique, the polynomial interpretations. The drawback is that such a method only applies to total functions (strongly normalizing programs). To overcome this problem we also study sup-interpretations through the notion of quasi-interpretation. Quasi-interpretations also suffer from a drawback that lies in the subterm property. This property drastically restricts the shape of the considered functions. Again we overcome this problem by introducing a new notion of interpretations mainly based on the dependency pairs method. We study the decidability and complexity of the sup-interpretation synthesis problem for all these three tools over sets of polynomials. Finally, we take benefit of some previous works on termination and runtime complexity to infer sup-interpretations.

DECIDABILITY, UNDECIDABILITY, AND GÖDEL'S INCOMPLETENESS IN RELATIVITY THEORIES

In this paper we investigate the logical decidability and undecidability properties of relativity theories. If we include into our theory the whole theory of the reals, then relativity theory still can be decidable. However, if we actually assume the structure of the quantities in our models to be the reals, or at least to be Archimedean, then we get possible predictions in the language of relativity theory which are independent of ZF set theory.

An undecidable property of context-free linear orders

We prove that there exists no algorithm to decide whether the language generated by a context-free grammar is dense with respect to the lexicographic ordering. As a corollary to this result, we show that it is undecidable whether the lexicographic orderings of the languages generated by two context-free grammars have the same order type.

Levels of undecidability in rewriting

Undecidability of various properties of first-order term rewriting systems is well-known. An undecidable property can be classified by the complexity of the formula defining it. This classification gives rise to a hierarchy of distinct levels of undecidability, starting from the arithmetical hierarchy classifying properties using first order arithmetical formulas, and continuing into the analytic hierarchy, where quantification over function variables is allowed. In this paper we give an overview of how the main properties of first order term rewriting systems are classified in these hierarchies. We consider properties related to normalization (strong normalization, weak normalization and dependency problems) and properties related to confluence (confluence, local confluence and the unique normal form property). For all of these we distinguish between the single term version and the uniform version. Where appropriate, we also distinguish between ground and open terms. Most uniform properties are Π 2 0 -complete. The particular problem of local confluence turns out to be Π 2 0 -complete for ground terms, but only Π 2 0 -complete (and thereby recursively enumerable) for open terms. The most surprising result concerns dependency pair problems without minimality flag: we prove this problem to be Π 1 1 -complete, hence not in the arithmetical hierarchy, but properly in the analytic hierarchy. Some of our results are new or have appeared in our earlier publications. Others are based on folklore constructions, and are included for completeness as their precise classifications have hardly been noticed previously.

On the undecidability of the limit behavior of Cellular Automata

Cellular Automata (CA) are discrete dynamical systems and an abstract model of parallel computation. The limit set of a cellular automaton is its maximal topological attractor. A well-known result, due to Kari, says that all nontrivial properties of limit sets are undecidable. In this paper we consider the properties of limit set dynamics, i.e. properties of the dynamics of CA restricted to their limit sets. There can be no equivalent of Kari’s theorem for limit set dynamics. Anyway we show that there is a large class of undecidable properties of limit set dynamics, namely all properties of limit set dynamics which imply stability or the existence of a unique subshift attractor. As a consequence we have that it is undecidable whether the cellular automaton map restricted to the limit set is the identity map and whether it is closing, injective, expansive, positively expansive and transitive.

Undecidable properties of flat term rewrite systems

Reachability, joinability and confluence properties are known to be undecidable for flat term rewrite systems (TRS). We give shorter and conceptually simpler proofs of these results. We also prove undecidability of weak normalization and unique normalization properties for flat TRS.

Undecidable problems for completely 0-simple semigroups

The decidability of the uniform word problem in a pseudovariety V of groups is known to be equivalent to the decidability of a number of embedding problems for finite semigroups in classes related to completely 0-simple semigroups with subgroups from V . Unfortunately the existing proof of some of these equivalences turns out to contain an error. We provide an update on these types of properties, correcting the error and amending results accordingly. Several new undecidability properties are exhibited, some superceding previous results. A theme of many of the new contributions is problems that are solvable in polynomial time but become undecidable when a facet of their description is restricted by some finiteness condition.

Undecidable Properties on Length-Two String Rewriting Systems

Length-two string rewriting systems are length-preserving string rewriting systems that consist of length-two rules. This paper shows that confluence, termination, left-most termination and right-most termination are undecidable properties for length-two string rewriting systems. These results mean that these properties are undecidable for the class of linear term rewriting systems in which depth-two variables are allowed in both sides of rules.

ALGORITHMS FOR THE JOIN AND AUTO-INTERSECTION OF MULTI-TAPE WEIGHTED FINITE-STATE MACHINES

A weighted finite-state machine with n tapes describes a rational relation on n strings. We recall some basic operations on n-ary rational relations, recast the important join operation in terms of "auto-intersection", and propose restricted algorithms for both operations. If two rational relations are joined on more than one tape, it can unfortunately lead to non-rational relations with undecidable properties. As a consequence, there cannot be a fully general algorithm, able to compile any rational join or auto-intersection. We define a class of triples 〈A,i,j〉 for which we are able to compile the auto-intersection of the machine A w.r.t. tapes i and j. We hope that this class is sufficient for many practical applications.

Metasystem transitions in human organizations: a route towards global sustainability

AbstractThis article deals with the problem of understanding the relations between viability and sustainability in the context of social metasystem transitions occurring in a global environment. To this aim the subject of Organizational Synergetics is introduced. A refinement of Stafford Beer's viable system model is proposed and the distinction is made between local sustainability and global sustainability, the latter seen as an undecidable property of the global system comprising both the system in focus and its environment. Finally, based on the concept of a viable holonic network, a strategy and a general heuristics for attaining global sustainability are proposed.

Remarks on Thatte’s transformation of term rewriting systems

We carry out a detailed analysis of Thatte’s transformation of term rewriting systems. We refute an earlier claim that this transformation preserves confluence for weakly persistent systems. We prove the preservation of weak normalization, and of confluence in weakly normalizing systems and in nonoverlapping systems with linear subtemplates. We conclude by proving that weak persistence is an undecidable property of term rewriting systems.

Decidability of Chaos for Some Families of Dynamical Systems

We show that the existence of positive Lyapounov exponents and/or SRB measures are undecidable (in the algorithmic sense) properties within some parametrized families of interesting dynamical systems: the quadratic family and Henon maps. Because the existence of positive exponents (or SRB measures) is, in a natural way, a manifestation of “chaos,” these results may be understood as saying that the chaotic character of a dynamical system is undecidable. Our investigation is directly motivated by questions asked by Carleson and Smale in this direction.