1 THE LOGIC IN COMPUTER SCIENCE COLUMN by 2 Yuri GUREVICH Electrical Engineering and Computer Science UniversityofMichigan, Ann Arb or, MI 48109-2122, USA
[email protected] Zero-One Laws Quisani: I heard you talking on nite mo del theory the other day.Itisinteresting indeed that all those famous theorems ab out rst-order logic fail in the case when only nite structures are allowed. I can understand that for those, likeyou, educated in the tradition of mathematical logic it seems very imp ortantto ndoutwhichof the classical theorems can b e rescued. But nite structures are to o imp ortant all by themselves. There's got to b e deep nite mo del theory that has nothing to do with in nite structures. Author: \Nothing to do" sounds a little extremist to me. Sometimes in nite ob jects are go o d approximations of nite ob jects. Q: I do not understand this. Usually, nite ob jects approximate in nite ones. A: It may happ en that the in nite case is cleaner and easier to deal with. For example, a long nite sum may b e replaced with a simpler integral. Returning to your question, there is indeed meaningful, inherently nite, mo del theory. One exciting issue is zero- one laws. Consider, say, undirected graphs and let be a propertyofsuch graphs. For example, may b e connectivity. What fraction of n-vertex graphs have the prop erty ? It turns out that, for many natural prop erties , this fraction converges to 0 or 1asn grows to in nity. If the fraction converges to 1, the prop erty is called almost sure.