A game comonadic account of Courcelle and Feferman-Vaught-Mostowski theorems

Abstract

Game comonads, introduced by Abramsky, Dawar and Wang, and developed by Abramsky and Shah, give a categorical semantics for model comparison games. We present an axiomatic account of Feferman-Vaught-Mostowski (FVM) composition theorems within the game comonad framework, parameterized by the model comparison game. In a uniform way, we produce compositionality results for the logic in question, and its positive existential and counting quantifier variants. Secondly, we extend game comonads to the second order setting, specifically in the case of Monadic Second Order (MSO) logic. We then generalize our FVM theorems to the second order case. We conclude with an abstract formulation of Courcelle's algorithmic meta-theorem, exploiting our earlier developments. This is instantiated to recover well-known bounded tree-width and bounded clique-width Courcelle theorems for MSO on graphs.