WEAK CARDINALITY THEOREMS.

Kummer's Cardinality Theorem states that a language A must be recursive if a Turing machine can exclude for any n words w, ¡, w one of the n + 1 possibilities for the cardinality of {w, ¡. w} ∩ A. There was good reason to believe that this theorem is a peculiarity of recursion theory: neither the Ca...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Publicado en:Journal of Symbolic Logic Vol. 70; no. 3; pp. 861 - 879
Autor principal: Tantau, Till
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Cambridge University Press Sep2005
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Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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Sumario:Kummer's Cardinality Theorem states that a language A must be recursive if a Turing machine can exclude for any n words w, ¡, w one of the n + 1 possibilities for the cardinality of {w, ¡. w} ∩ A. There was good reason to believe that this theorem is a peculiarity of recursion theory: neither the Cardinality Theorem nor weak forms of it bold for resource-bounded computational models like polynomial time. This belief may be flawed. In this paper it is shown that weak cardinality theorems hold for finite automata and also for other models. An explanation is proposed as to why recursion-theoretic and automata-theoretic weak cardinality theorems hold, but not corresponding 'middle-ground theorems': The recursion- and automata-theoretic weak cardinality theorems are instantiations of purely logical weak cardinality theorems. The logical theorems can be instantiated for logical structures characterizing recursive computations and finite automata computations. A corresponding structure characterizing polynomial time computations does not exist.