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Expressive power and abstraction in Essence

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Abstract

Development of languages for specifying or modelling problems is an important direction in constraint modelling. To provide greater abstraction and modelling convenience, these languages are becoming more syntactically rich, leading to a variety of questions about their expressive power. In this paper, we consider the expressiveness of Essence, a specification language with a rich variety of syntactic features. We identify natural fragments of Essence that capture the complexity classes P, NP, all levels \(\Sigma_i^p\) of the polynomial-time hierarchy, and all levels k-NEXP of the nondeterministic exponential-time hierarchy. The union of these classes is the very large complexity class ELEMENTARY. One goal is to begin to understand which features play a role in the high expressive power of the language and which are purely features of convenience. We also discuss the formalization of arithmetic in Essence and related languages, a notion of capturing NP-search which is slightly different than that of capturing NP, and a conjectured limit to the expressive power of Essence. Our study is an application of descriptive complexity theory, and illustrates the value of taking a logic-based view of modelling and specification languages.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computational Logic Laboratory, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada

    David G. Mitchell & Eugenia Ternovska

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  1. David G. Mitchell
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  2. Eugenia Ternovska
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Correspondence to David G. Mitchell.

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Mitchell, D.G., Ternovska, E. Expressive power and abstraction in Essence . Constraints 13, 343–384 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10601-008-9050-3

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