A Decidable Fragment of Second Order Logic With Applications to Synthesis P. Madhusudan University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA
[email protected] Umang Mathur University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA
[email protected] https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7610-0660 Shambwaditya Saha University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA
[email protected] Mahesh Viswanathan University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA
[email protected] Abstract We propose a fragment of many-sorted second order logic called EQSMT and show that checking satisfiability of sentences in this fragment is decidable. EQSMT formulae have an ∃∗∀∗ quan- tifier prefix (over variables, functions and relations) making EQSMT conducive for modeling synthesis problems. Moreover, EQSMT allows reasoning using a combination of background the- ories provided that they have a decidable satisfiability problem for the ∃∗∀∗ FO-fragment (e.g., linear arithmetic). Our decision procedure reduces the satisfiability of EQSMT formulae to satis- fiability queries of ∃∗∀∗ formulae of each individual background theory, allowing us to use existing efficient SMT solvers supporting ∃∗∀∗ reasoning for these theories; hence our procedure can be seen as effectively quantified SMT (EQSMT ) reasoning. 2012 ACM Subject Classification Theory of computation → Logic → Logic and verification Keywords and phrases second order logic, synthesis, decidable fragment Digital Object Identifier 10.4230/LIPIcs.CSL.2018.30 Funding This work has been supported by NSF grants 1422798, 1329991, 1138994 and 1527395. 1 Introduction The goal of program synthesis is to automatically construct a program that satisfies a given arXiv:1712.05513v3 [cs.LO] 27 Sep 2018 specification. This problem has received a lot of attention from the research community in recent years [34, 4, 14].