On ground word problem of term equation systems

We give semi-decision procedures for the ground word problem of variable preserving term equation systems and term equation systems. They are natural improvements of two well known trivial semi-decision procedures. We show the correctness of our procedures

Context unification is in PSPACE

Contexts are terms with one `hole', i.e. a place in which we can substitute an argument. In context unification we are given an equation over terms with variables representing contexts and ask about the satisfiability of this equation. Context unification is a natural subvariant of second-order unification, which is undecidable, and a generalization of word equations, which are decidable, at the same time. It is the unique problem between those two whose decidability is uncertain (for already almost two decades). In this paper we show that the context unification is in PSPACE. The result holds under a (usual) assumption that the first-order signature is finite. This result is obtained by an extension of the recompression technique, recently developed by the author and used in particular to obtain a new PSPACE algorithm for satisfiability of word equations, to context unification. The recompression is based on performing simple compression rules (replacing pairs of neighbouring function symbols), which are (conceptually) applied on the solution of the context equation and modifying the equation in a way so that such compression steps can be in fact performed directly on the equation, without the knowledge of the actual solution.Comment: 27 pages, submitted, small notation changes and small improvements over the previous tex

Computations in Large N Matrix Mechanics

The algebraic formulation of Large N matrix mechanics recently developed by Halpern and Schwartz leads to a practical method of numerical computation for both action and Hamiltonian problems. The new technique posits a boundary condition on the planar connected parts X_w, namely that they should decrease rapidly with increasing order. This leads to algebraic/variational schemes of computation which show remarkably rapid convergence in numerical tests on some many- matrix models. The method allows the calculation of all moments of the ground state, in a sequence of approximations, and excited states can be determined as well. There are two unexpected findings: a large d expansion and a new selection rule for certain types of interaction.Comment: 27 page

Canonized Rewriting and Ground AC Completion Modulo Shostak Theories : Design and Implementation

AC-completion efficiently handles equality modulo associative and commutative function symbols. When the input is ground, the procedure terminates and provides a decision algorithm for the word problem. In this paper, we present a modular extension of ground AC-completion for deciding formulas in the combination of the theory of equality with user-defined AC symbols, uninterpreted symbols and an arbitrary signature disjoint Shostak theory X. Our algorithm, called AC(X), is obtained by augmenting in a modular way ground AC-completion with the canonizer and solver present for the theory X. This integration rests on canonized rewriting, a new relation reminiscent to normalized rewriting, which integrates canonizers in rewriting steps. AC(X) is proved sound, complete and terminating, and is implemented to extend the core of the Alt-Ergo theorem prover.Comment: 30 pages, full version of the paper TACAS'11 paper "Canonized Rewriting and Ground AC-Completion Modulo Shostak Theories" accepted for publication by LMCS (Logical Methods in Computer Science