4,290 research outputs found
Decreasing Diagrams for Confluence and Commutation
Like termination, confluence is a central property of rewrite systems. Unlike
for termination, however, there exists no known complexity hierarchy for
confluence. In this paper we investigate whether the decreasing diagrams
technique can be used to obtain such a hierarchy. The decreasing diagrams
technique is one of the strongest and most versatile methods for proving
confluence of abstract rewrite systems. It is complete for countable systems,
and it has many well-known confluence criteria as corollaries.
So what makes decreasing diagrams so powerful? In contrast to other
confluence techniques, decreasing diagrams employ a labelling of the steps with
labels from a well-founded order in order to conclude confluence of the
underlying unlabelled relation. Hence it is natural to ask how the size of the
label set influences the strength of the technique. In particular, what class
of abstract rewrite systems can be proven confluent using decreasing diagrams
restricted to 1 label, 2 labels, 3 labels, and so on? Surprisingly, we find
that two labels suffice for proving confluence for every abstract rewrite
system having the cofinality property, thus in particular for every confluent,
countable system.
Secondly, we show that this result stands in sharp contrast to the situation
for commutation of rewrite relations, where the hierarchy does not collapse.
Thirdly, investigating the possibility of a confluence hierarchy, we
determine the first-order (non-)definability of the notion of confluence and
related properties, using techniques from finite model theory. We find that in
particular Hanf's theorem is fruitful for elegant proofs of undefinability of
properties of abstract rewrite systems
Proving Looping and Non-Looping Non-Termination by Finite Automata
A new technique is presented to prove non-termination of term rewriting. The
basic idea is to find a non-empty regular language of terms that is closed
under rewriting and does not contain normal forms. It is automated by
representing the language by a tree automaton with a fixed number of states,
and expressing the mentioned requirements in a SAT formula. Satisfiability of
this formula implies non-termination. Our approach succeeds for many examples
where all earlier techniques fail, for instance for the S-rule from combinatory
logic
Polynomial Path Orders: A Maximal Model
This paper is concerned with the automated complexity analysis of term
rewrite systems (TRSs for short) and the ramification of these in implicit
computational complexity theory (ICC for short). We introduce a novel path
order with multiset status, the polynomial path order POP*. Essentially relying
on the principle of predicative recursion as proposed by Bellantoni and Cook,
its distinct feature is the tight control of resources on compatible TRSs: The
(innermost) runtime complexity of compatible TRSs is polynomially bounded. We
have implemented the technique, as underpinned by our experimental evidence our
approach to the automated runtime complexity analysis is not only feasible, but
compared to existing methods incredibly fast. As an application in the context
of ICC we provide an order-theoretic characterisation of the polytime
computable functions. To be precise, the polytime computable functions are
exactly the functions computable by an orthogonal constructor TRS compatible
with POP*
Complexity Hierarchies and Higher-Order Cons-Free Rewriting
Constructor rewriting systems are said to be cons-free if, roughly,
constructor terms in the right-hand sides of rules are subterms of constructor
terms in the left-hand side; the computational intuition is that rules cannot
build new data structures. It is well-known that cons-free programming
languages can be used to characterize computational complexity classes, and
that cons-free first-order term rewriting can be used to characterize the set
of polynomial-time decidable sets.
We investigate cons-free higher-order term rewriting systems, the complexity
classes they characterize, and how these depend on the order of the types used
in the systems. We prove that, for every k 1, left-linear cons-free
systems with type order k characterize ETIME if arbitrary evaluation is
used (i.e., the system does not have a fixed reduction strategy).
The main difference with prior work in implicit complexity is that (i) our
results hold for non-orthogonal term rewriting systems with possible rule
overlaps with no assumptions about reduction strategy, (ii) results for such
term rewriting systems have previously only been obtained for k = 1, and with
additional syntactic restrictions on top of cons-freeness and left-linearity.
Our results are apparently among the first implicit characterizations of the
hierarchy E = ETIME ETIME .... Our work
confirms prior results that having full non-determinism (via overlaps of rules)
does not directly allow characterization of non-deterministic complexity
classes like NE. We also show that non-determinism makes the classes
characterized highly sensitive to minor syntactic changes such as admitting
product types or non-left-linear rules.Comment: Extended version (with appendices) of a paper published in FSCD 201
Decreasing diagrams for confluence and commutation
Like termination, confluence is a central property of rewrite systems. Unlike for termination, however, there exists no known complexity hierarchy for confluence. In this paper we investigate whether the decreasing diagrams technique can be used to obtain such a hierarchy. The decreasing diagrams technique is one of the strongest and most versatile methods for proving confluence of abstract rewrite systems. It is complete for countable systems, and it has many well-known confluence criteria as corollaries. So what makes decreasing diagrams so powerful? In contrast to other confluence techniques, decreasing diagrams employ a labelling of the steps with labels from a wellfounded order in order to conclude confluence of the underlying unlabelled relation. Hence it is natural to ask how the size of the label set influences the strength of the technique. In particular, what class of abstract rewrite systems can be proven confluent using decreasing diagrams restricted to 1 label, 2 labels, 3 labels, and so on? Surprisingly, we find that two labels suffice for proving confluence for every abstract rewrite system having the cofinality property, thus in particular for every confluent, countable system. Secondly, we show that this result stands in sharp contrast to the situation for commutation of rewrite relations, where the hierarchy does not collapse. Thirdly, investigating the possibility of a confluence hierarchy, we determine the first-order (non-)definability of the notion of confluence and related properties, using techniques from finite model theory. We find that in particular Hanf ’s theorem is fruitful for elegant proofs of undefinability of properties of abstract rewrite systems
A rewriting approach to binary decision diagrams
AbstractBinary decision diagrams (BDDs) provide an established technique for propositional formula manipulation. In this paper, we present the basic BDD theory by means of standard rewriting techniques. Since a BDD is a DAG instead of a tree we need a notion of shared rewriting and develop appropriate theory. A rewriting system is presented by which canonical reduced ordered BDDs (ROBDDs) can be obtained and for which uniqueness of ROBDD representation is proved. Next, an alternative rewriting system is presented, suitable for actually computing ROBDDs from formulas. For this rewriting system a layerwise strategy is defined, and it is proved that when replacing the classical apply-algorithm by layerwise rewriting, roughly the same complexity bound is reached as in the classical algorithm. Moreover, a layerwise innermost strategy is defined and it is proved that the full classical algorithm for computing ROBDDs can be replaced by layerwise innermost rewriting without essentially affecting the complexity. Finally a lazy strategy is proposed sometimes performing much better than the traditional algorithm
- …