The expressive power of existential first order sentences of Büchi's sequential calculus - Archive ouverte HAL
Journal Articles Discrete Mathematics Year : 2005

The expressive power of existential first order sentences of Büchi's sequential calculus

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to study the first order theory of the successor, interpreted on finite words. More specifically, we complete the study of the hierarchy based on quantifier alternations (or ?n-hierarchy). It was known (Thomas, 1982) that this hierarchy collapses at level 2, but the expressive power of the lower levels was not characterized effectively. We give a semigroup theoretic description of the expressive power of B?1-, the boolean combinations of existential formulas. Our characterization is algebraic and makes use of the syntactic semigroup, but contrary to a number of results in this field, is not in the scope of Eilenberg's variety theorem, since B?1-definable languages are not closed under residuals. An important consequence is the following: given one of the levels of the hierarchy, there is polynomial time algorithm to decide whether the language accepted by a deterministic n-state automaton is expressible by a sentence of this level.
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Dates and versions

hal-00112833 , version 1 (09-11-2006)

Identifiers

  • HAL Id : hal-00112833 , version 1

Cite

Jean-Eric Pin. The expressive power of existential first order sentences of Büchi's sequential calculus. Discrete Mathematics, 2005, 291, pp.155-174. ⟨hal-00112833⟩
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