The Complexity and Expressive Power of Second-Order Extended Logic

Abstract

We study the expressive powers of SO-HORN$^{*}$, SO-HORN$^{r}$ and SO-HORN$^{*r}$ on all finite structures. We show that SO-HORN$^{r}$, SO-HORN$^{*r}$, FO(LFP) coincide with each other and SO-HORN$^{*}$ is proper sublogic of SO-HORN$^{r}$. To prove this result, we introduce the notions of DATALOG$^{*}$ program, DATALOG$^{r}$ program and their stratified versions, S-DATALOG$^{*}$ program and S-DATALOG$^{r}$ program. It is shown that, on all structures, DATALOG$^{r}$ and S-DATALOG$^{r}$ are equivalent and DATALOG$^{*}$ is a proper sublogic of DATALOG$^{r}$. SO-HORN$^{*}$ and SO-HORN$^{r}$ can be treated as the negations of DATALOG$^{*}$ and DATALOG$^{r}$, respectively. We also show that SO-EHORN$^{r}$ logic which is an extended version of SO-HORN captures co-NP on all finite structures.