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arxiv: 1003.0802 · v1 · submitted 2010-03-03 · 💻 cs.LO · cs.CC

The complexity of positive first-order logic without equality

classification 💻 cs.LO cs.CC
keywords complexitypositiveequality-freefirst-orderlogicproblemalgebraiccharacterises
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We study the complexity of evaluating positive equality-free sentences of first-order (FO) logic over a fixed, finite structure B. This may be seen as a natural generalisation of the non-uniform quantified constraint satisfaction problem QCSP(B). We introduce surjective hyper-endomorphisms and use them in proving a Galois connection that characterises definability in positive equality-free FO. Through an algebraic method, we derive a complete complexity classification for our problems as B ranges over structures of size at most three. Specifically, each problem is either in Logspace, is NP-complete, is co-NP-complete or is Pspace-complete.

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