+In 1965, one year after Hironaka, Ax and Kochen used the model theory of valued fields to prove a corrected version of Artin's Conjecture. Thereafter they, and independently Ershov, proved the decidability of the elementary theory of the fields of p-adic numbers. The problem for their counterpart in positive characteristic, the Laurent series fields over finite fields, is still open. I will explain which tools can be used to prove decidability. Via general principles of model theory, the task can be reduced to proving embedding lemmas for valued function fields, which I will describe. This in turn requires a good structure theory for such valued function fields, and this is what our decidability problem has in common with the local uniformization problem. In analogy to the local uniformization problem, our theory of the defect has led to partial solutions, in the sense of new model theoretic results about certain classes of valued fields in positive characteristic.
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