On the Decidability of Monadic Second-Order Logic with Arithmetic Predicates
Valérie Berthé, Toghrul Karimov, Joris Nieuwveld, Joël Ouaknine, Mihir Vahanwala, James Worrell · 2024
We investigate the decidability of the monadic second-order (MSO) theory of the structure (N; <, P1,…,Pk), for various unary predicates P1,…,Pk ⊆ N. We focus in particular on 'arithmetic' predicates arising in the study of linear recurrence sequences, such as fixed-base powers Powk = {kn : n ∈ N}, k-th powers Nk = {nk : n ∈ N}, and the set of terms of the Fibonacci sequence Fib = {0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13,…} (and similarly for other linear recurrence sequences having a single, non-repeated, dominant characteristic root). We obtain several new unconditional and conditional decidability results, a select sample of which are the following: