Building Decision Procedures in the Calculus of Inductive Constructions

It is commonly agreed that the success of future proof assistants will rely on their ability to incorporate computations within deduction in order to mimic the mathematician when replacing the proof of a proposition P by the proof of an equivalent proposition P' obtained from P thanks to possibly complex calculations. In this paper, we investigate a new version of the calculus of inductive constructions which incorporates arbitrary decision procedures into deduction via the conversion rule of the calculus. The novelty of the problem in the context of the calculus of inductive constructions lies in the fact that the computation mechanism varies along proof-checking: goals are sent to the decision procedure together with the set of user hypotheses available from the current context. Our main result shows that this extension of the calculus of constructions does not compromise its main properties: confluence, subject reduction, strong normalization and consistency are all preserved

The First-Order Theory of Ground Tree Rewrite Graphs

We prove that the complexity of the uniform first-order theory of ground tree rewrite graphs is in ATIME(2^{2^{poly(n)}},O(n)). Providing a matching lower bound, we show that there is some fixed ground tree rewrite graph whose first-order theory is hard for ATIME(2^{2^{poly(n)}},poly(n)) with respect to logspace reductions. Finally, we prove that there exists a fixed ground tree rewrite graph together with a single unary predicate in form of a regular tree language such that the resulting structure has a non-elementary first-order theory.Comment: accepted for Logical Methods in Computer Scienc

Term rewriting systems from Church-Rosser to Knuth-Bendix and beyond

Term rewriting systems are important for computability theory of abstract data types, for automatic theorem proving, and for the foundations of functional programming. In this short survey we present, starting from first principles, several of the basic notions and facts in the area of term rewriting. Our treatment, which often will be informal, covers abstract rewriting, Combinatory Logic, orthogonal systems, strategies, critical pair completion, and some extended rewriting formats

Termination of Narrowing: Automated Proofs and Modularity Properties

En 1936 Alan Turing demostro que el halting problem, esto es, el problema de decidir si un programa termina o no, es un problema indecidible para la inmensa mayoria de los lenguajes de programacion. A pesar de ello, la terminacion es un problema tan relevante que en las ultimas decadas un gran numero de tecnicas han sido desarrolladas para demostrar la terminacion de forma automatica de la maxima cantidad posible de programas. Los sistemas de reescritura de terminos proporcionan un marco teorico abstracto perfecto para el estudio de la terminacion de programas. En este marco, la evaluaci on de un t ermino consiste en la aplicacion no determinista de un conjunto de reglas de reescritura. El estrechamiento (narrowing) de terminos es una generalizacion de la reescritura que proporciona un mecanismo de razonamiento automatico. Por ejemplo, dado un conjunto de reglas que denan la suma y la multiplicacion, la reescritura permite calcular expresiones aritmeticas, mientras que el estrechamiento permite resolver ecuaciones con variables. Esta tesis constituye el primer estudio en profundidad de las propiedades de terminacion del estrechamiento. Las contribuciones son las siguientes. En primer lugar, se identican clases de sistemas en las que el estrechamiento tiene un comportamiento bueno, en el sentido de que siempre termina. Muchos metodos de razonamiento automatico, como el analisis de la semantica de lenguajes de programaci on mediante operadores de punto jo, se benefician de esta caracterizacion. En segundo lugar, se introduce un metodo automatico, basado en el marco teorico de pares de dependencia, para demostrar la terminacion del estrechamiento en un sistema particular. Nuestro metodo es, por primera vez, aplicable a cualquier clase de sistemas. En tercer lugar, se propone un nuevo metodo para estudiar la terminacion del estrechamiento desde un termino particular, permitiendo el analisis de la terminacion de lenguajes de programacion. El nuevo metodo generaliza losIborra López, J. (2010). Termination of Narrowing: Automated Proofs and Modularity Properties [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/19251Palanci