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Hybrid-Dynamic Ehrenfeucht-Fraïssé Games

journal contribution
posted on 2025-09-22, 04:49 authored by Guillermo Badia, Daniel Gaina, Alexander Knapp, Tomasz KowalskiTomasz Kowalski, Martin Wirsing
Ehrenfeucht-Fraïssé games provide means to characterize elementary equivalence for first-order logic, and by standard translation also for modal logics. We propose a novel generalization of Ehrenfeucht-Fraïssé games to hybrid-dynamic logics which is direct and fully modular: parameterized by the features of the hybrid language we wish to include, for instance, the modal and hybrid language operators as well as first-order existential quantification. We use these games to establish a new modular Fraïssé-Hintikka theorem for hybrid-dynamic propositional logic and its various fragments. We study the relationship between countable game equivalence (determined by countable Ehrenfeucht-Fraïssé games) and bisimulation (determined by countable back-and-forth systems). In general, the former turns out to be weaker than the latter, but under certain conditions on the language, the two coincide. As a corollary we obtain an analogue of the Hennessy-Milner theorem. We also prove that for reachable image-finite Kripke structures elementary equivalence implies isomorphism.<p></p>

History

Publication Date

2025-10-01

Journal

ACM Transactions on Computational Logic

Volume

26

Issue

4

Article Number

22

Pagination

25p.

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

ISSN

1529-3785

Rights Statement

© 2025 The owner/author(s). This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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