AbstractMostowski [11] shows that if a structure has a decidable theory, then its weak direct power has one as well; his proof however never produces decision procedures which are elementary recursive.Some very general results are obtained here about the nature of the weak direct power of a structure, which in most cases lead to elementary recursive decision procedures for weak direct powers of structures which themselves have elementary recursive procedures.In particular, it is shown that 〈N*, +〉, the weak direct power of 〈N, +〉, can be decided in spacefor some constant c. As corollaries, the same upper bound is obtained for the theory of the structure 〈N+, ·〉 of positive integers under multiplication, and for the theory of finite abelian groups. Fischer and Rabin [7] have shown that the theory of 〈N,* +〉 requires timeeven on nondeterministic Turing machines.
A new upper bound for the cross number of finite abelian groups
