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Annals of Pure and Applied Logic
Volume 130, Issues 1-3, December 2004, Pages 3-31
Papers presented at the 2002 IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS)
 
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doi:10.1016/j.apal.2004.01.007    
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Copyright © 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The complexity of first-order and monadic second-order logic revisited

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Markus FrickE-mail The Corresponding Author, a and Martin GroheCorresponding Author Contact Information, E-mail The Corresponding Author, b

a SAP AG, Neurottstr. 15a, 69190, Walldorf, Germany

b Institut für Informatik, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10099, Berlin, Germany


Available online 23 June 2004.

Abstract

The model-checking problem for a logic L on a class C of structures asks whether a given L-sentence holds in a given structure in C. In this paper, we give super-exponential lower bounds for fixed-parameter tractable model-checking problems for first-order and monadic second-order logic.

We show that unless PTIME=NP, the model-checking problem for monadic second-order logic on finite words is not solvable in time f(kp(n), for any elementary function f and any polynomial p. Here k denotes the size of the input sentence and n the size of the input word. We establish a number of similar lower bounds for the model-checking problem for first-order logic, for example, on the class of all trees.

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Annals of Pure and Applied Logic
Volume 130, Issues 1-3, December 2004, Pages 3-31
Papers presented at the 2002 IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS)
 
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