Towards a Unification of Logic and Information Theory

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Lastras, Luis A., Trager, Barry, Lenchner, Jonathan, Szpankowski, Wojtek, Wu, Chai Wah, Squillante, Mark, Fagin, Ron, Gray, Alex
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866909784505057280
author Lastras, Luis A.
Trager, Barry
Lenchner, Jonathan
Szpankowski, Wojtek
Wu, Chai Wah
Squillante, Mark
Fagin, Ron
Gray, Alex
author_facet Lastras, Luis A.
Trager, Barry
Lenchner, Jonathan
Szpankowski, Wojtek
Wu, Chai Wah
Squillante, Mark
Fagin, Ron
Gray, Alex
contents Today, the vast majority of the world's digital information is represented using the fundamental assumption, introduced by Claude Shannon in 1948, that ``...the semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem (of the design of communication systems)...''. Consider, nonetheless, the observation that we often combine a message with other information in order to deduce new facts, thereby expanding the value of such a message. It is noteworthy that to-date, no rigorous theory of communication has been put forth which postulates the existence of deductive capabilities on the receiver's side. The purpose of this paper is to present such a theory. We formally model such deductive capabilities using logic reasoning, and present a rigorous theory which covers the following generic scenario: Alice and Bob each have knowledge of some logic sentence, and they wish to communicate as efficiently as possible with the shared goal that, following their communication, Bob should be able to deduce a particular logic sentence that Alice knows to be true, but that Bob currently cannot prove. Many variants of this general setup are considered in this article; in all cases we are able to provide sharp upper and lower bounds. Our contribution includes the identification of the most fundamental requirements that we place on a logic and associated logical language for all of our results to apply. Practical algorithms that are in some cases asymptotically optimal are provided, and we illustrate the potential practical value of the design of communication systems that incorporate the assumption of deductive capabilities at the receiver using experimental results that suggest significant possible gains compared to classical systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2301_10414
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards a Unification of Logic and Information Theory
Lastras, Luis A.
Trager, Barry
Lenchner, Jonathan
Szpankowski, Wojtek
Wu, Chai Wah
Squillante, Mark
Fagin, Ron
Gray, Alex
Information Theory
Logic in Computer Science
Today, the vast majority of the world's digital information is represented using the fundamental assumption, introduced by Claude Shannon in 1948, that ``...the semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem (of the design of communication systems)...''. Consider, nonetheless, the observation that we often combine a message with other information in order to deduce new facts, thereby expanding the value of such a message. It is noteworthy that to-date, no rigorous theory of communication has been put forth which postulates the existence of deductive capabilities on the receiver's side. The purpose of this paper is to present such a theory. We formally model such deductive capabilities using logic reasoning, and present a rigorous theory which covers the following generic scenario: Alice and Bob each have knowledge of some logic sentence, and they wish to communicate as efficiently as possible with the shared goal that, following their communication, Bob should be able to deduce a particular logic sentence that Alice knows to be true, but that Bob currently cannot prove. Many variants of this general setup are considered in this article; in all cases we are able to provide sharp upper and lower bounds. Our contribution includes the identification of the most fundamental requirements that we place on a logic and associated logical language for all of our results to apply. Practical algorithms that are in some cases asymptotically optimal are provided, and we illustrate the potential practical value of the design of communication systems that incorporate the assumption of deductive capabilities at the receiver using experimental results that suggest significant possible gains compared to classical systems.
title Towards a Unification of Logic and Information Theory
topic Information Theory
Logic in Computer Science
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.10414