A General Framework for Automatic Termination Analysis of Logic Programs

This paper describes a general framework for automatic termination analysis of logic programs, where we understand by ``termination'' the finitenes s of the LD-tree constructed for the program and a given query. A general property of mappings from a certain subset of the branches of an infinite LD-tree into a finite set is proved. From this result several termination theorems are derived, by using different finite sets. The first two are formulated for the predicate dependency and atom dependency graphs. Then a general result for the case of the query-mapping pairs relevant to a program is proved (cf. \cite{Sagiv,Lindenstrauss:Sagiv}). The correctness of the {\em TermiLog} system described in \cite{Lindenstrauss:Sagiv:Serebrenik} follows from it. In this system it is not possible to prove termination for programs involving arithmetic predicates, since the usual order for the integers is not well-founded. A new method, which can be easily incorporated in {\em TermiLog} or similar systems, is presented, which makes it possible to prove termination for programs involving arithmetic predicates. It is based on combining a finite abstraction of the integers with the technique of the query-mapping pairs, and is essentially capable of dividing a termination proof into several cases, such that a simple termination function suffices for each case. Finally several possible extensions are outlined

On van der Corput property of shifted primes

We prove that the upper bound for the van der Corput property of the set of shifted primes is O((log n)^{-1+o(1)}), giving an answer to a problem considered by Ruzsa and Montgomery for the set of shifted primes p-1. We construct normed non-negative valued cosine polynomials with the spectrum in the set p-1, p<=n, and a small free coefficient a_0=O((log n)^{-1+o(1)}). This implies the same bound for the Poincar\'e property of the set p-1, and also bounds for several properties related to uniform distribution of related sets