38 research outputs found
Star Games and Hydras
The recursive path ordering is an established and crucial tool in term
rewriting to prove termination. We revisit its presentation by means of some
simple rules on trees (or corresponding terms) equipped with a 'star' as
control symbol, signifying a command to make that tree (or term) smaller in the
order being defined. This leads to star games that are very convenient for
proving termination of many rewriting tasks. For instance, using already the
simplest star game on finite unlabeled trees, we obtain a very direct proof of
termination of the famous Hydra battle, direct in the sense that there is not
the usual mention of ordinals. We also include an alternative road to setting
up the star games, using a proof method of Buchholz, adapted by van Oostrom,
resulting in a quantitative version of the star as control symbol. We conclude
with a number of questions and future research directions
Succinctness in subsystems of the spatial mu-calculus
In this paper we systematically explore questions of succinctness in modal
logics employed in spatial reasoning. We show that the closure operator,
despite being less expressive, is exponentially more succinct than the
limit-point operator, and that the -calculus is exponentially more
succinct than the equally-expressive tangled limit operator. These results hold
for any class of spaces containing at least one crowded metric space or
containing all spaces based on ordinals below , with the usual
limit operator. We also show that these results continue to hold even if we
enrich the less succinct language with the universal modality
Star Games and Hydras
The recursive path ordering is an established and crucial tool in term
rewriting to prove termination. We revisit its presentation by means of some
simple rules on trees (or corresponding terms) equipped with a 'star' as
control symbol, signifying a command to make that tree (or term) smaller in the
order being defined. This leads to star games that are very convenient for
proving termination of many rewriting tasks. For instance, using already the
simplest star game on finite unlabeled trees, we obtain a very direct proof of
termination of the famous Hydra battle, direct in the sense that there is not
the usual mention of ordinals. We also include an alternative road to setting
up the star games, using a proof method of Buchholz, adapted by van Oostrom,
resulting in a quantitative version of the star as control symbol. We conclude
with a number of questions and future research directions
Introduction and Proof of the Goodstein Sequence and Hydra Game
This thesis will introduce and prove the theorem of the Hydra Game as well as the theorem surrounding the Goodstein sequence. The two problems which are clearly intertwined will be introduced and solved with the assumption that the reader has no previous knowledge of them and little to no knowledge of ordinal numbers. All results have previusly been reached and presented, most notably by Kirby and Paris (Kirby et al, 1982). The aim of the paper is not to break ground but educate. The end of the paper will mention how these theorems show limitations of Peano Arithmetic but will not attempt to prove the statement
Hydra Battles and AC Termination
We present a new encoding of the Battle of Hercules and Hydra as a rewrite system with AC symbols. Unlike earlier term rewriting encodings, it faithfully models any strategy of Hercules to beat Hydra. To prove the termination of our encoding, we employ type introduction in connection with many-sorted semantic labeling for AC rewriting and AC-RPO
The Parametric Complexity of Lossy Counter Machines
The reachability problem in lossy counter machines is the best-known ACKERMANN-complete problem and has been used to establish most of the ACKERMANN-hardness statements in the literature. This hides however a complexity gap when the number of counters is fixed. We close this gap and prove F_d-completeness for machines with d counters, which provides the first known uncontrived problems complete for the fast-growing complexity classes at levels 3 < d < omega. We develop for this an approach through antichain factorisations of bad sequences and analysing the length of controlled antichains