Constructive Many-one Reduction from the Halting Problem to Semi-unification (Extended Version)

Semi-unification is the combination of first-order unification and first-order matching. The undecidability of semi-unification has been proven by Kfoury, Tiuryn, and Urzyczyn in the 1990s by Turing reduction from Turing machine immortality (existence of a diverging configuration). The particular Turing reduction is intricate, uses non-computational principles, and involves various intermediate models of computation. The present work gives a constructive many-one reduction from the Turing machine halting problem to semi-unification. This establishes RE-completeness of semi-unification under many-one reductions. Computability of the reduction function, constructivity of the argument, and correctness of the argument is witnessed by an axiom-free mechanization in the Coq proof assistant. Arguably, this serves as comprehensive, precise, and surveyable evidence for the result at hand. The mechanization is incorporated into the existing, well-maintained Coq library of undecidability proofs. Notably, a variant of Hooper's argument for the undecidability of Turing machine immortality is part of the mechanization

Almost Every Simply Typed Lambda-Term Has a Long Beta-Reduction Sequence

It is well known that the length of a beta-reduction sequence of a simply typed lambda-term of order k can be huge; it is as large as k-fold exponential in the size of the lambda-term in the worst case. We consider the following relevant question about quantitative properties, instead of the worst case: how many simply typed lambda-terms have very long reduction sequences? We provide a partial answer to this question, by showing that asymptotically almost every simply typed lambda-term of order k has a reduction sequence as long as (k-1)-fold exponential in the term size, under the assumption that the arity of functions and the number of variables that may occur in every subterm are bounded above by a constant. To prove it, we have extended the infinite monkey theorem for strings to a parametrized one for regular tree languages, which may be of independent interest. The work has been motivated by quantitative analysis of the complexity of higher-order model checking