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INFINITARY LOGIC HAS NO EXPRESSIVE EFFICIENCY OVER FINITARY LOGIC

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2023

MATTHEW HARRISON-TRAINOR
Affiliation:
DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATICS UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN ANN ARBOR, MI 48109, USA E-mail: matthhar@umich.edu URL: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~matthhar
MILES KRETSCHMER*
Affiliation:
DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATICS UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY BERKELEY, CA 94720, USA
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Abstract

We can measure the complexity of a logical formula by counting the number of alternations between existential and universal quantifiers. Suppose that an elementary first-order formula $\varphi $ (in $\mathcal {L}_{\omega ,\omega }$) is equivalent to a formula of the infinitary language $\mathcal {L}_{\infty ,\omega }$ with n alternations of quantifiers. We prove that $\varphi $ is equivalent to a finitary formula with n alternations of quantifiers. Thus using infinitary logic does not allow us to express a finitary formula in a simpler way.

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Article
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Association for Symbolic Logic