Circuits over Sets of Natural Numbers

Last October I mentioned an open problem of Pierre McKenzie. In short, consider a circuit whose wires contain subsets of the natural numbers. Inputs are {0} and {1}. The gates consist of union, intersection, complement, addition and multiplication. For sets A and B, A+B = {x+y | x in A and y in B} and A×B = {xy| x in A and y in B}.

Is the following problem decidable: Given such a circuit for a set A and a natural number w, is w in A?

Here is the paper by McKenzie and Klaus Wagner that describes this problem and gives results for many subcases. It will appear in the upcoming STACS Conference.

I have been haunted by the simplicity of the question and the difficult of the solution. Let me give you the proof (which I left as an exercise in the earlier post) that a decision procedure for the problem would yield a way to determine Goldbach's conjecture that every even number greater than 2 is a sum of two primes.

Define the set GE2 (the numbers at least 2) as {0}∪{1}. Define PRIMES as GE2∩GE2×GE2. Define GOLDBACH as (GE2×2)∩( PRIMES+PRIMES). Now we have Goldbach's conjecture is true if only if 0 is not in {0}×GOLDBACH.

Since I don't think Goldbach's conjecture has an easy decision procedure, I don't believe there is a decision algorithm for the problem. Proving this seems very tricky. The obvious idea is to try and create Diophantine equations. But even generating the set of squares is open.