Stone Pseudovarieties

This is a paper on Stone duality in computer science with special focus on topics with applications in formal language theory. In Section 2 we give a general overview of Stone duality in its various forms: for Boolean algebras, distributive lattices, and frames. For distributive lattices, we discuss both Stone and Priestley duality. We identify how to move between the different dualities and which dual spaces carry the Scott topology. We then focus on three themes. The first theme is additional operations on distributive lattices and Boolean algebras. Additional operations arise in denotational semantics in the form of predicate transformers. In verification they occur in the form of modal operators. They play an essential role in Eilenberg's variety theorem in the form of quotient operations. Quotient operations are unary instantiations of residual operators which are dual to the operations in the profinite algebras of algebraic language theory. We discuss additional operations in Section 3. The second theme is that of hyperspaces, that is, spaces of subsets of an underlying space. Some classes of algebras may be seen as the class of algebras for a functor. In the case of predicate transformers the dual functors are hyperspace constructions such as the Plotkin, Smyth, and Hoare powerdomain constructions. The algebras-for-a-functor point of view is central to the coalgebraic study of modal logic and to the solution of domain In the algebraic theory of formal languages various hyperspace-related product constructions, such as block and Schutzenberger products, are used to study complexity hierarchies. We describe a construction, similar to the Schutzenberger product, which is dual to adding a layer of quantification to formulas describing formal languages. We discuss hyperspaces in Section 4. The final theme is that of equations. These are pairs of elements of dual spaces. They arise via the duality between subalgebras and quotient spaces and have provided one of the most successful tools for obtaining decidability results for classes of regular languages. The perspective provided by duality allows us to obtain a notion of equations for the study of arbitrary formal languages. Equations in language theory is the topic of Section 5.

Stone duality, topological algebra, and recognition

Methods and results from the representation theory of finite di- mensional algebras have led to many interactions with other areas of mathe- matics. Such areas include the theory of Lie algebras and quantum groups, commutative algebra, algebraic geometry and topology, and in particular the new theory of cluster algebras. The aim of this workshop was to further de- velop such interactions and to stimulate progress in the representation theory of algebras.

Contents: Introduction. §1: Computable rings and modules. §2: Ideal membership relation. §3: Effective structured domains. §4: Completion of a local ring as a domain. §5: The recursive completion. Epilogue. References.Introduction. Completion is an important general mathematical device. Often, but not always, a completion takes the following form. Let A be a topological algebraic structure whose topology is derived from a metric. For A, a topological algebra  and an embedding i: A →  are constructed such that  is a complete metric space in which A is densely embedded by i. The long list of structures for which such completions exist begins with Cantor's construction of the real number field and includes objects like the p-adic integers, Baire space, and Boolean algebras. In Bourbaki [6] a careful and thorough account of completions for arbitrary topological groups and fields is given, for which it is important to note that the topological structures need not be metrizable, but must possess a uniformity.The effectiveness of the completion process of a computable structure A cannot be readily studied using the tools of computable algebra, simply because the resulting structure  is almost invariably uncountable. However, in particular cases, it has been possible to define and study the substructure Ak of computable elements of Â; this has been done for the structures mentioned above, starting with the field of recursive real numbers.In this paper we analyse the effectivity of the completion of a local ring R. We do this using structured Scott-Ershov domains. Our study may be considered as a prototype containing methods applicable to a broad class of completions, including all the examples mentioned above, except for the real number field, which needs a generalisation of the domain concept.A Scott-Ershov domain D formalises how a set Dt of possibly “infinite” elements, called total elements, is constructed from a set Dc of “finite” elements, called compact elements. This is achieved by means of an approximation ordering which determines a topology on D and, in particular, on Dt. Our methodology is to associate to a given topological algebra A a structured domain D(A) such that the total elements D(A)t form a topological algebra topologically isomorphic to A. In such circumstances A is said to be domain definable by D(A). The theory of computability for domains is now applied to study the effectivity of the topological algebra A.

On the generalized spectra of topological algebras

While the theory of languages of words is very mature, our understanding of relations on words is still lagging behind. And yet such relations appear in many new applications such as verification of parameterized systems, querying graph-structured data, and information extraction, for instance. Classes of well-behaved relations typically used in such applications are obtained by adapting some of the equivalent definitions of regularity of words for relations, leading to non-equivalent notions of recognizable, regular, and rational relations. The goal of this paper is to propose a systematic way of defining classes of relations on words, of which these three classes are just natural examples, and to demonstrate its advantages compared to some of the standard techniques for studying word relations. The key idea is that of a synchronization of a pair of words, which is a word over an extended alphabet. Using it, we define classes of relations via classes of regular languages over a fixed alphabet, just {1,2} for binary relations. We characterize some of the standard classes of relations on words via finiteness of parameters of synchronization languages, called shift, lag, and shiftlag. We describe these conditions in terms of the structure of cycles of graphs underlying automata, thereby showing their decidability. We show that for these classes there exist canonical synchronization languages, and every class of relations can be effectively re-synchronized using those canonical representatives. We also give sufficient conditions on synchronization languages, defined in terms of injectivity and surjectivity of their Parikh images, that guarantee closure under intersection and complement of the classes of relations they define.

It is well known that the laws of logic governing the sentence connectives—“and”, “or”, “not”, etc.—can be expressed by means of equations in the theory of Boolean algebras. The task of providing a similar algebraic setting for the full first-order predicate logic is the primary concern of algebraic logicians. The best-known efforts in this direction are the polyadic algebras of Halmos (cf. [2]) and the cylindric algebras of Tarski (cf. [3]), both of which may be described as Boolean algebras with infinitely many additional operations. In particular, there is a primitive operator, cκ, corresponding to each quantification, ∃υκ. In this paper we explore a version of algebraic logic conceived by A. H. Copeland, Sr., and described in [1], which has this advantage: All operators are generated from a finite set of primitive operations.Following the theory of cylindric algebras, we introduce, in the natural way, the classes of Copeland set algebras (SCpA), representable Copeland algebras (RCpA), and Copeland algebras of formulas. Playing a central role in the discussion is the set, Γ, of all equations holding in every set algebra. The reason for this is that the operations in a set algebra reflect the notion of satisfaction of a formula in a model, and hence an equation expresses the fact that two formulas are satisfied by the same sequences of objects in the model. Thus to say that an equation holds in every set algebra is to assert that a certain pair of formulas are logically equivalent.

We deal with problems associated with Scott ranks of Boolean algebras. The Scott rank can be treated as some measure of complexity of an algebraic system. Our aim is to propound and justify the procedure which, given any countable Boolean algebra, will allow us to construct a Boolean algebra of a small Scott rank that has the same natural algebraic complexity as has the initial algebra. In particular, we show that the Scott rank does not always serve as a good measure of complexity for the class of Boolean algebras. We also study into the question as to whether or not a Boolean algebra of a big Scott rank can be decomposed into direct summands with intermediate ranks. Examples are furnished in which Boolean algebras have an arbitrarily big Scott rank such that direct summands in them either have a same rank or a fixed small one, and summands of intermediate ranks are altogether missing. This series of examples indicates, in particular, that there may be no nontrivial mutual evaluations for the Scott and Frechet ranks on a class of countable Boolean algebras.

On functional representations of topological algebras

A classic result in the theory of Boolean algebras states that the dual space of the Boolean algebra of all subsets of a set U is homeomorphic to the Stone-Čech compactification of the discrete space U. It is shown in this chapter that the natural extension of this result to Boolean algebras with operators is false. In more detail, the analogue for Boolean algebras with operators of the Boolean algebra of subsets of a set U is the complex algebra \(\mathfrak{C}\mathfrak{m}(U)\) of a relational structure \(\mathfrak{U}\). It is shown that the dual space of \(\mathfrak{C}\mathfrak{m}(U)\) is not, in general, homeo-isomorphic to the Stone-Čech compactification of the structure \(\mathfrak{U}\) endowed with the discrete topology. However, a characterization of the dual space of the complex algebra \(\mathfrak{C}\mathfrak{m}(U)\) is given that may be viewed as a generalization of the Boolean result: the dual space of \(\mathfrak{C}\mathfrak{m}(U)\) is homeo-isomorphic to the Stone-Čech weak compactification of the discrete space \(\mathfrak{U}\). In fact, there is a lattice isomorphism between the lattice of equivalence classes of weak compactifications of the discrete space \(\mathfrak{U}\) and the lattice of subalgebras of the complex algebra \(\mathfrak{C}\mathfrak{m}(U)\) that contain all singleton subsets; and this lattice isomorphism maps the Stone-Čech weak compactification of \(\mathfrak{U}\) to the complex algebra \(\mathfrak{C}\mathfrak{m}(U)\) itself. If a relational structure is of finitary character, then the preceding result holds with the term “weak compactification” replaced by “compactification”. In particular, for Boolean algebras without operators we obtain the new result that there is an isomorphism from the lattice of equivalence classes of compactifications of a discrete space U to the lattice of subalgebras of the Boolean algebra of all subsets of U that contain the finite subsets of U. The arguments needed to establish these results are based upon a hybrid duality theory for homomorphisms that combines aspects of the algebraic and topological duality theories developed in Chapters 1 and 2 respectively.KeywordsWeak CompactificationFinite CharacterComplex AlgebraDiscrete TopologySubalgebrasThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

A monadic (Boolean) algebra is a Boolean algebra A together with an operator 3 on A (called an existential quantifier, or, simply, a quantifier) such that 30=0, pfk 3p, and 3(^A 3q) = 3p* 3g whenever p and q are in A. Most of this note uses nothing more profound about monadic algebras than the definition. The reader interested in the motivation for and the basic facts in the theory of monadic algebras may, however, wish to consult [2]. Every Boolean algebra can be converted into a monadic algebra, usually in several ways. (One way is to write 3p = p for all p; another is to write Bp =0 or 1 according p =0 or py^O. These special operators are known the discrete and the simple quantifier, respectively.) It follows, a fortiori, that every Boolean algebra can be embedded into a monadic algebra, and it is clear, on grounds of universal algebra, that among the monadic extensions of a Boolean algebra there is one that is as free possible. To be more precise, let us say that a monadic algebra A is a free monadic extension of a Boolean algebra B if (i) B is a Boolean subalgebra of A, (ii) A is (monadically) generated by B, (iii) every Boolean homomorphism g that maps B into an arbitrary monadic algebra C has a (necessarily unique) extension to a monadic homomorphism f that maps A into C. The statement that a monadic extension as free possible always exists means that every Boolean algebra B has a free monadic extension A; the algebra A is uniquely determined to within a monadic isomorphism that is equal to the identity on B. The purpose of what follows is to give a constructive proof of this fact, i.e., a proof that exhibits A by means of certain set-theoretic constructions based on B (instead of a structurally not very informative proof via equivalence classes of strings of symbols). A by-product of the proof is a rather satisfying insight into the structure of the (Stone) dual space of the free monadic extension. The theorem can (and will) be formulated in such a way to subsume the results of Hyman Bass [l ] on the cardinal number of finitely generated free monadic algebras. The idea of the construction is this. Step 1: form a free Boolean algebra generated by a copy of B. Step 2: adjoin the elements of that

This paper studies the relaxation of word-order, using dependency grammars (DG’s). We study ‘relax-ability of languages (and DG’s)’ based on the notion of DR-(non)projectivity. We obtain two infinite scales of classes of languages using different degrees of relaxation. The one scale contains the class of context-free languages as its first (minimal) element, the other one starts by the class of regular languages.

Some topics in topological algebra

Inspired by RNA-editing, we study an elementary formalism of string replacement based on insertion and deletion using a fixed finite set of guides, and in which only occurrences of a single symbol are inserted or deleted. While in this replacement mechanism computation lengths are at most exponential by construction, we show that this exponential upper bound is tight. Moreover, we show that both the class of regular languages and the class of context-free languages are not closed under this replacement mechanism.

Model checking is often cited as a success story for transitioning and engineering ideas rooted in logics and automata to practice. In this paper, we discuss how the efforts aimed at improving the scope and effectiveness of model checking tools have revived the study of logics and automata leading to unexpected theoretical advances whose impact is not limited to model checking. In particular, we describe how our efforts to add context-free specifications to software model checking led us to the model of nested words as a representation of data with both a linear ordering and a hierarchically nested matching of items. Such dual structure occurs in diverse corners of computer science ranging from executions of structured programs where there is a well-nested matching of entries to and exits from functions and procedures, to XML documents with the hierarchical structure specified by start-tags matched with end-tags. Finite-state acceptors of nested words define the class of regular languages of nested words that has all the appealing theoretical properties that the class of regular word languages enjoys. We review the emerging theory of nested words, its extension to nested trees, and its potential applications.