Transitive Closure - in Logic and Computational Complexity

In Logic and Computational Complexity

In finite model theory, first-order logic (FO) extended with a transitive closure operator is usually called transitive closure logic, and abbreviated FO(TC) or just TC. TC is a sub-type of fixpoint logics. The fact that FO(TC) is strictly more expressive than FO was discovered by Ronald Fagin in 1974; the result was then rediscovered by Alfred Aho and Jeffrey Ullman in 1979, who proposed to use fixpoint logic as a database query language (Libkin 2004:vii). With more recent concepts of finite model theory, proof that FO(TC) is strictly more expressive than FO follows immediately from the fact that FO(TC) is not Gaifman-local (Libkin 2004:49).

In computational complexity theory, the complexity class NL corresponds precisely to the set of logical sentences expressible in TC. This is because the transitive closure property has a close relationship with the NL-complete problem STCON for finding directed paths in a graph. Similarly, the class L is first-order logic with the commutative, transitive closure. When transitive closure is added to second-order logic instead, we obtain PSPACE.