Universal Horn Sentences and the Joint Embedding Property

Manuel Bodirsky, Jakub Rydval, André Schrottenloher · Discrete Mathematics & Theoretical Computer Science · 2022

The finite models of a universal sentence $\Phi$ in a finite relational signature are the age of a structure if and only if $\Phi$ has the joint embedding property. We prove that the computational problem whether a given universal sentence $\Phi$ has the joint embedding property is undecidable, even if $\Phi$ is additionally Horn and the signature of $\Phi$ only contains relation symbols of arity at most two.

Read the paper · More papers on PaperTik