2,848 research outputs found
Higher-Order Termination: from Kruskal to Computability
Termination is a major question in both logic and computer science. In logic,
termination is at the heart of proof theory where it is usually called strong
normalization (of cut elimination). In computer science, termination has always
been an important issue for showing programs correct. In the early days of
logic, strong normalization was usually shown by assigning ordinals to
expressions in such a way that eliminating a cut would yield an expression with
a smaller ordinal. In the early days of verification, computer scientists used
similar ideas, interpreting the arguments of a program call by a natural
number, such as their size. Showing the size of the arguments to decrease for
each recursive call gives a termination proof of the program, which is however
rather weak since it can only yield quite small ordinals. In the sixties, Tait
invented a new method for showing cut elimination of natural deduction, based
on a predicate over the set of terms, such that the membership of an expression
to the predicate implied the strong normalization property for that expression.
The predicate being defined by induction on types, or even as a fixpoint, this
method could yield much larger ordinals. Later generalized by Girard under the
name of reducibility or computability candidates, it showed very effective in
proving the strong normalization property of typed lambda-calculi..
Instruction sequence processing operators
Instruction sequence is a key concept in practice, but it has as yet not come
prominently into the picture in theoretical circles. This paper concerns
instruction sequences, the behaviours produced by them under execution, the
interaction between these behaviours and components of the execution
environment, and two issues relating to computability theory. Positioning
Turing's result regarding the undecidability of the halting problem as a result
about programs rather than machines, and taking instruction sequences as
programs, we analyse the autosolvability requirement that a program of a
certain kind must solve the halting problem for all programs of that kind. We
present novel results concerning this autosolvability requirement. The analysis
is streamlined by using the notion of a functional unit, which is an abstract
state-based model of a machine. In the case where the behaviours exhibited by a
component of an execution environment can be viewed as the behaviours of a
machine in its different states, the behaviours concerned are completely
determined by a functional unit. The above-mentioned analysis involves
functional units whose possible states represent the possible contents of the
tapes of Turing machines with a particular tape alphabet. We also investigate
functional units whose possible states are the natural numbers. This
investigation yields a novel computability result, viz. the existence of a
universal computable functional unit for natural numbers.Comment: 37 pages; missing equations in table 3 added; combined with
arXiv:0911.1851 [cs.PL] and arXiv:0911.5018 [cs.LO]; introduction and
concluding remarks rewritten; remarks and examples added; minor error in
proof of theorem 4 correcte
Inductive-data-type Systems
In a previous work ("Abstract Data Type Systems", TCS 173(2), 1997), the last
two authors presented a combined language made of a (strongly normalizing)
algebraic rewrite system and a typed lambda-calculus enriched by
pattern-matching definitions following a certain format, called the "General
Schema", which generalizes the usual recursor definitions for natural numbers
and similar "basic inductive types". This combined language was shown to be
strongly normalizing. The purpose of this paper is to reformulate and extend
the General Schema in order to make it easily extensible, to capture a more
general class of inductive types, called "strictly positive", and to ease the
strong normalization proof of the resulting system. This result provides a
computation model for the combination of an algebraic specification language
based on abstract data types and of a strongly typed functional language with
strictly positive inductive types.Comment: Theoretical Computer Science (2002
Square root meadows
Let Q_0 denote the rational numbers expanded to a meadow by totalizing
inversion such that 0^{-1}=0. Q_0 can be expanded by a total sign function s
that extracts the sign of a rational number. In this paper we discuss an
extension Q_0(s ,\sqrt) of the signed rationals in which every number has a
unique square root.Comment: 9 page
An Axiomatic Setup for Algorithmic Homological Algebra and an Alternative Approach to Localization
In this paper we develop an axiomatic setup for algorithmic homological
algebra of Abelian categories. This is done by exhibiting all existential
quantifiers entering the definition of an Abelian category, which for the sake
of computability need to be turned into constructive ones. We do this
explicitly for the often-studied example Abelian category of finitely presented
modules over a so-called computable ring , i.e., a ring with an explicit
algorithm to solve one-sided (in)homogeneous linear systems over . For a
finitely generated maximal ideal in a commutative ring we
show how solving (in)homogeneous linear systems over can be
reduced to solving associated systems over . Hence, the computability of
implies that of . As a corollary we obtain the computability
of the category of finitely presented -modules as an Abelian
category, without the need of a Mora-like algorithm. The reduction also yields,
as a by-product, a complexity estimation for the ideal membership problem over
local polynomial rings. Finally, in the case of localized polynomial rings we
demonstrate the computational advantage of our homologically motivated
alternative approach in comparison to an existing implementation of Mora's
algorithm.Comment: Fixed a typo in the proof of Lemma 4.3 spotted by Sebastian Posu
- …