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Decidability of Definability

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2014

Manuel Bodirsky ,
Michael Pinsker  and
Todor Tsankov
Manuel Bodirsky
Affiliation:
Laboratoire d'Informatique (LIX), CNRS UMR 7161, École Polytechnique, 91128 Palaiseau, France, E-mail: bodirsky@lix.polytechnique.fr, URL: http://www.lix.polytechnique.fr/~bodirsky/
Michael Pinsker
Affiliation:
Équipe de Logique Mathématique, Université Diderot, —Paris 7, UFR de Mathématiques, 75205 Paris Cedex 13, France, E-mail: marula@gmx.at, URL: http://dmg.tuwien.ac.at/pinsker/
Todor Tsankov
Affiliation:
Équipe de Logique Mathématique, Université Diderot, —Paris 7, UFR de Mathématiques, 75205 Paris Cedex 13, France, E-mail: todor@math.jussieu.fr, URL: http://people.math.jussieu.fr/~todor/
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Abstract

For a fixed countably infinite structure Γ with finite relational signature τ, we study the following computational problem: input are quantifier-free τ-formulas ϕ0, ϕ1, …, ϕn that define relations R0, R1, …, Rn over Γ. The question is whether the relation R0 is primitive positive definable from R1, …, Rn, i.e., definable by a first-order formula that uses only relation symbols for R1, …, Rn, equality, conjunctions, and existential quantification (disjunction, negation, and universal quantification are forbidden).

We show decidability of this problem for all structures Γ that have a first-order definition in an ordered homogeneous structure Δ with a finite relational signature whose age is a Ramsey class and determined by finitely many forbidden substructures. Examples of structures Γ with this property are the order of the rationals, the random graph, the homogeneous universal poset, the random tournament, all homogeneous universal C-relations, and many more. We also obtain decidability of the problem when we replace primitive positive definability by existential positive, or existential definability. Our proof makes use of universal algebraic and model theoretic concepts, Ramsey theory, and a recent characterization of Ramsey classes in topological dynamics.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Symbolic Logic , Volume 78 , Issue 4 , December 2013 , pp. 1036 - 1054
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Symbolic Logic 2013

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References

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