Guarded Second-Order Logic, Spanning Trees, and Network Flows

Abstract

According to a theorem of Courcelle monadic second-order logic and guarded second-order logic (where one can also quantify over sets of edges) have the same expressive power over the class of all countable $k$-sparse hypergraphs. In the first part of the present paper we extend this result to hypergraphs of arbitrary cardinality. In the second part, we present a generalisation dealing with methods to encode sets of vertices by single vertices.

Keywords

• computer science - logic in computer science
• computer science - discrete mathematics
• g.2.2
• f.4.1