Notes on Systems of Very Weak Unary Dyadic Arithmetic

We introduce several very weak first-order theories of unary concatenation of dyadic strings and investigate their relationships to other previously studied veey weak first-order theories, namely the theory WT of binary trees of Kristiansen and Murwanashyaka, the theory WD of binary concatenation of Murwanashyaka, and Robinson's very weak arithmetic R.

We prove that all these theories are mutually formally interpretable with the theories of unary concatenation studied in the paper, thus establishing essential undecidability of the latter.

In the process we show that binary concatenation is first-order definable from unary concatenation modulo the presence of the initial segment relation plus either the end segment relation or the inverse operation on words, thus giving a positive solution to a problem posed by Karlov.