The µ-calculus can be viewed as essentially the "ultimate" program logic, as it expressively subsumes all propositional program logics, including dynamic logics, process logics, and temporal logics. It is known that the satisfiability problem for the µ-calculus is EXPTIME-complete. This upper bound, however, is known for a version of the logic that has only forward modalities, which express weakest preconditions, but not backward modalities, which express strongest postconditions. Our main result in this paper is an exponential time upper bound for the satisfiability problem of the µ-calculus with both forward and backward modalities. To get this result we develop a theory of two-way alternating automata on infinite trees.

We study two important extensions of first-order logic (FO) with iteration, the fixpoint and while queries. The main result of the paper concerns the open problem of the relationship between fixpoint and while: they are the same iff ptime = pspace. These and other expressibility results are obtained using a powerful normal form for while which shows that each while computation over an unordered domain can be reduced to a while computation over an ordered domain via a fixpoint query. The fixpoint query computes an equivalence relation on tuples which is a congruence with respect to the rest of the computation. The same technique is used to show that equivalence of tuples and structures with respect to FO formulas with bounded number of variables is definable in fixpoint. Generalizing fixpoint and while, we consider more powerful languages which model arbitrary computation interacting with a database using a finite set of FO queries. Such computation is modeled by a relational machine...

We identify the computational complexity of the satisfiability problem for FO², the fragment of first-order logic consisting of all relational first-order sentences with at most two distinct variables. Although this fragment was shown to be decidable a long time ago, the computational complexity of its decision problem has not been pinpointed so far. In 1975 Mortimer proved that FO² has the finite-model property, which means that if an FO²-sentence is satisfiable, then it has a finite model. Moreover, Mortimer showed that every satisfiable FO²-sentence has a model whose size is at most doubly exponential in the size of the sentence. In this paper, we improve Mortimer's bound by one exponential and show that every satisfiable FO²-sentence has a model whose size is at most exponential in the size of the sentence. As a consequence, we establish that the satisfiability problem for FO² is NEXPTIME-complete.

We establish a general connection between fixpoint logic and complexity. On one side, we have fixpoint logic, parameterized by the choices of 1st-order operators (inflationary or noninflationary) and iteration constructs (deterministic, nondeterministic, or alternating). On the other side, we have the complexity classes between P and EXPTIME. Our parameterized fixpoint logics capture the complexity classes P, NP, PSPACE, and EXPTIME, but equality is achieved only over ordered structures. There is, however, an inherent mismatch between complexity and logic -- while computational devices work on encodings of problems, logic is applied directly to the underlying mathematical structures. To overcome this mismatch, we develop a theory of relational complexity, which bridges tha gap between standard complexity and fixpoint logic. On one hand, we show that questions about containments among standard complexity classes can be translated to questions about containments among relational complex...

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We consider extensions of first order logic (FO) and fixed point logic (FP) by means of generalized quantifiers in the sense of Lindstrom. We show that adding a finite set of such quantifiers to FP fails to capture PTIME, even over a fixed signature. This strengthens results in [10] and [15]. We also prove a stronger version of this result for PSPACE, which enables us to establish a weak version of a conjecture formulated in [16]. These results are obtained by defining a notion of element type for bounded variable logics with finitely many generalized quantifiers. Using these, we characterize the classes of finite structures over which the infinitary logic L ! 1! extended by a finite set of generalized quantifiers Q is no more expressive than first order logic extended by the quantifiers in Q . 1 Introduction Computational complexity measures the complexity of a problem in terms of the resources, such as time, space, or hardware, required to solve the problem relative to a given ma...

this paper rather abstract, \static" set-theoretic view on the World-Wide Web (WWW) or, more generally, on Web-like Data Bases (WDB) and on the corresponding querying to WDB. Let us stress that it is not only about databases with an access via Web. The database itself should be organized in the same way as Web. I.e. it must consist of hyperlinked pages distributed among the computers participating either in global network like Internet or in some local, isolated from the outside world specic network based essentially on the same principles, except globality, and called also Intranet [15].

The Ordered conjecture of Kolaitis and Vardi asks whether fixed-point logic differs from first-order logic on every infinite class of finite ordered structures. In this paper, we develop the tool of bounded variable element types, and illustrate its application to this and the original conjectures of McColm, which arose from the study of inductive definability and infinitary logic on proficient classes of finite structures (those admitting an unbounded induction). In particular, for a class of finite structures, we introduce a compactness notion which yields a new proof of a ramified version of McColm's second conjecture. Furthermore, we show a connection between a model-theoretic preservation property and the Ordered Conjecture, allowing us to prove it for classes of strings (colored orderings). We also elaborate on complexity-theoretic implications of this line of research.

Consider the class of all those properties of worlds in finite Kripke structures (or of states in finite transition systems), that are ffl recognizable in polynomial time, and ffl closed under bisimulation equivalence. It is shown that the class of these bisimulation-invariant Ptime queries has a natural logical characterization. It is captured by the straightforward extension of propositional µ-calculus to arbitrary finite dimension. Bisimulation-invariant Ptime, or the modal fragment of Ptime, thus proves to be one of the very rare cases in which a logical characterization is known in a setting of unordered structures. It is also shown that higher-dimensional µ-calculus is undecidable for satisfiability in finite structures, and even \Sigma 1 1 -hard over general structures.

We show that a form of divide and conquer recursion on sets together with the relational algebra expresses exactly the queries over ordered relational databases which are NC -computable. At a finer level, we relate k nested uses of recursion exactly to AC k , k 1. We also give corresponding results for complex objects. 1 Introduction NC is the complexity class of functions that are computable in poly-logarithmic time with polynomially many processors on a parallel random access machine (PRAM). The query language for NC discussed here is centered around a form of divide and conquer recursion (dcr ) on finite sets which has obvious potential for parallel evaluation and can easily express, for example, transitive closure and parity. Divide and conquer with parameters e; f; u defines the unique function ', notation dcr (e; f; u), taking finite sets as arguments, such that: '(;) def = e '(fyg) def = f(y) '(s 1 [ s 2 ) def = u('(s 1 ); '(s 2 )) when s 1 " s 2 = ; For parity, we t...